In December 2011, the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine issued a landmark report confirming that the current use of chimpanzees for invasive biomedical research is “largely unnecessary.” Nearly 1,000 chimpanzees remain in six U.S. laboratories, with about 500 of them owned by the federal government. The cost to federal taxpayers is $30 million a year to maintain these animals and use them in research, and the United States is the only industrialized nation to continue this practice.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) report was commissioned by the National Institutes of Health following an outcry over the agency’s 2010 proposal to move 186 federally-owned chimpanzees from Alamogordo, N.M., to the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio. These chimpanzees, including 53 year-old Flo, had already been subjected to decades of harmful research, yet were slated to be available again for invasive experiments.
At the urging of thousands of animal advocates—including more than 25,000 HSUS supporters, several U.S. senators, and former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson—the NIH announced in January 2011 that it would postpone the transfer of the remaining Alamogordo chimpanzees until the IOM committee issued a report on the necessity of using of chimpanzees in research. NIH director Francis Collins indicated at a December press briefing that the Alamogordo chimps would not be used in research for the foreseeable future. He also announced that a Council of Councils would be formed to make an assessment of what uses of chimps conform to the NIH guidelines. Those uses that fall outside the recommendations of the IOM report will be terminated in time.
The IOM’s findings support the overwhelming evidence that the use of chimpanzees in harmful research should end, except in very narrow circumstances. The report makes plain that the limited usefulness of chimps will diminish further over time, especially as alternative methods are developed.
NIH instructed the committee to disregard ethical and financial considerations when making its decision, but these factors cannot be logically excluded from any judgment about future uses of chimps. The cost to taxpayers would be significantly reduced if invasive research ended and the same chimpanzees were retired to nonprofit sanctuaries, where they live in far superior environments at a lower cost than the confined housing in laboratories—which do not have highly professional staff that know how to provide an enriched and humane environment. It is financially irresponsible to continue throwing research dollars away supporting chimpanzee research instead of pursuing innovative and cost-effective approaches that are also more humane.?Now that we have affirmation by a panel of experts that the scientific rationale for using chimps is very highly questionable, it’s up to Congress to pass the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act. Chimpanzees suffer immense, lasting physical and psychological harm from being used in invasive experiments in laboratories. Our 2009 undercover investigation demonstrated that the complex needs of chimpanzees simply cannot be met in a laboratory setting.
These bills (S. 810 and H.R. 1513), which combined have nearly 150 cosponsors in the House and Senate, would phase out harmful research on chimpanzees in laboratories and retire the approximately 500 federally owned chimpanzees—including those at the Alamogordo Primate Facility—to permanent sanctuary. Meanwhile, The HSUS has petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to upgrade all chimpanzee populations as endangered—an outcome that would also end the use of chimps in invasive experiments.
In the wake of this important report, please act today to urge your legislators to end the use of chimpanzees in harmful research once and for all.
I watched a stirring video on YouTube last month. A team of whale advocates and scientists in the Sea of Cortez in Mexico came across a humpback whale hopelessly entangled in a gill net, disabling the animal so severely that she could not have survived much longer without intervention. One member of the team swam over to her and tried to disentangle her. Eventually, the team pulled the boat beside her, and everyone labored to cut away the net and free her, fin by fin— celebrating after more than a half-hour of cutting and straining to finally allowing the leviathan to swim. The whale was gentle during the ordeal, even though she was in a life-threatening situation with people she did not know. She quickly learned these people were friends, and they were trying to help.
The team stuck around to bask in the wonder of the encounter and soon got a second surprise – a display worthy of any July 4th celebration. It wasn’t a fireworks show, but a display of breaching and splashing that signaled to the team that this whale was not only euphoric but deeply appreciative. You can judge for yourself by watching the full video here. (If you come across an injured marine mammal or other wild animal, your first response should be to contact personnel with a marine mammal stranding or rescue center).
In our field, there are people who save animals every day, though not that often the biggest animals who have ever lived on the planet. But what many people don’t realize is that animals exhibit some mighty acts of altruism toward us, too. It’s not uncommon for us to read in the papers about dogs fending off an intruder or alerting a family to a fire in the middle of the night.
But wild animals have also been known to come to our aid. In “The Bond,” I wrote about several of these stories, such as a pod of dolphins in New Zealand who protected a group of swimmers from a great white shark in 2004. The dolphins herded the swimmers together and formed a circle around them, slapping their tails and keeping the shark at bay until a rescue boat arrived.
Another rescue that captivated people around the world took place at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago in 1996, and I open the second chapter in the book with this story. A 3-year-old boy climbed a fence and tumbled nearly 20 feet into a pit, hitting his head and falling unconscious. Not only was he injured, but he had fallen into an enclosure with seven lowland gorillas — powerful animals who can grow to be more than 400 pounds. But as the crowd watched, a mother gorilla named Binti Jua gently picked up the boy and carried him to the door of the exhibit, where zookeepers and emergency personnel could reach him. The child received treatment and recovered, and Binti Jua was hailed as a hero.
You can find many other accounts of dolphins saving swimmers, dogs and cats alerting their families to danger, and other animals such as parrots and horses helping people in trouble. These acts of bravery and selflessness are another reminder of how much we have in common with animals, and how much people have often underestimated the intelligence, emotions and altruism of other creatures.
For more on the special relationship between animals and humans, visit http://hsus.typepad.com/.
Through the years, I’ve heard many flimsy arguments from the apologists for animal abuse, and among the most persistent has been an appeal to cultural prerogative or tradition – in short, that the conduct in question is an expression of the “culture” of a particular nationality, community, ethnicity or race, and therefore, it should somehow be treated as sacrosanct. The bullfighters in Spain invoke culture as a defense for the staged stabbing or slaughter of a bull in arenas often packed full of non-Spaniards on vacation in the country. Or in Louisiana, the last state to outlaw animal fighting, cockfighters claimed that these staged slashing derbies, with knives attached to the birds’ legs to augment the bloodletting, are a Cajun tradition, even though the forebears of today’s Acadians seemed to have little to do with this ancient form of animal combat.
In March, The New York Times reported on the latest instance in which the values of animal protection and cultural identity appear at odds – the debate in California over the consumption of shark-fin soup. There, a broad coalition, including The Humane Society of the United States, is backing legislation to outlaw the possession, sale and trade of shark fins, which are the central ingredient in the soup that bears the same name.
There is a small minority within the Chinese-American community who have claimed the legislation to be a sort of thinly veiled cultural attack, and they want to preserve their right to see sharks caught, their fins slashed off, and their bodies dumped back in the ocean, so that the fanciers of this appetizer – a symbol of wealth and prestige – can eat their shark-fin soup in peace. To hell with the fact that up to 73 million sharks are killed across the globe each year for this soup. They want to eat the soup most describe as lacking flavor, and if so many sharks have to suffer and die for it, then so be it.
It seems that their recklessly selfish argument is, however, not quite as popular within the Asian and Asian-American communities as The New York Times piece may suggest. The author of the shark protection bill is California State Assembly Member Paul Fong, D-Cupertino, one of only a handful of Chinese-American lawmakers in the state legislature. He’s called the killing of sharks for their fins “a horrific scene.” Humane advocate Judy Ki also proudly claims an Asian lineage, but she offers a similar message: “Asian-Pacific Americans that want to enjoy premium quality seafood have many sustainable alternatives to shark fin. Those who are profiting from the slaughter of sharks solely for their fins are misusing race and culture to defend the industry.” A cohort of Asian chefs has also joined the campaign, along with a raft of scientists, animal welfare advocates, environmentalists, and commercial and recreational fishermen aware of the terrible animal welfare and ocean health implications of shark finning.
There are also similar shark-protection bills in Oregon and Washington state. The Washington legislation is sponsored by State Senate Majority Assistant Whip Kevin Ranker, D-San Juan Island, and has passed the Natural Resources & Marine Waters Committee that he chairs. If these bills are passed, it will be a major advance for the global campaign to protect tens of millions of sharks from the cruel deaths they now endure. Among other Pacific Rim states and territories, Hawaii and the Northern Marianas have already adopted similar prohibitions, and a similar bill awaits the Guam governor’s signature. And President Obama, who grew up in the Pacific Rim, signed legislation in January to ban landing sharks without their fins attached.
Culture is never a compelling defense for cruelty, especially when the cruelty is so dispensable and where alternatives abound. Animal protection is not the domain of any culture or community, but rather, it is a universal value. Good people of every background honor the notions of mercy and decency to other creatures. Stopping the killing of sharks for fins won’t diminish the proud culture of China or any other Asian nation. It will enhance it, since the presence of cruelty erodes the fabric of any civil society and mars the history books for any people who’ve ever elected to tolerate the vile mistreatment of helpless creatures.
In September, the House Energy and Commerce Committee conducted a hearing on this summer’s massive egg recall, and witnesses included the owners of the factory farms that spawned the salmonella crisis and a couple of the downstream victims – consumers who ate foods containing eggs contaminated with salmonella and nearly died. The testimony of some of the victims was chilling, and it even prompted one congressman, Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, to declare he’s now switching to cage-free eggs.
He’s got the right instinct. The central problem is not that there were a couple of reckless factory farm operators, though it’s certainly true that Jack DeCoster, owner of one of the two farms linked to the salmonella outbreak, has had a history of cutting corners at his egg farms across the country. It’s really a systemic problem – with the industry as a whole adopting battery cage confinement systems that victimize every creature confined in these cages and create an overcrowded, unhealthy environment that is high-risk for the spread of pathogens like salmonella.
We don’t just need to wash eggs better, or only make sure rodents haven’t colonized these places or that dead birds are removed from cages. We need to get rid of the cages and give animals more space. By giving them more space, we are better to the animals and reduce excessively high stocking densities that are among the root causes of the food safety problems, too.
And the evidence linking cages to unsanitary and inhumane conditions is hardly new. In fact, The HSUS’s investigation of Iowa egg factories earlier this year found nearly identical conditions to those found during the FDA’s inspection of the companies responsible for the current recall.
Our diet matters. We vote for or against cruelty, and for or against food safety, with our own food choices every day. That’s why I was also struck by the comments of former President Bill Clinton, who has adopted a nearly vegan diet. He told Wolf Blitzer of CNN that he’s now eating a plant-based diet, that he’s lost 24 pounds since he started it, and that’s he’s studied the issue very carefully, reading the works of Drs. Dean Ornish, Colin Campbell, and others. He’s said he feels like he’s now part of the experiment to prove that eating a plant-based diet is a way to improve the functioning of arteries and to deal with problems of cholesterol and fat.
When we are conscious eaters, we can help animals, protect the environment, enhance food safety, and protect our own health. We have an opportunity to live a healthy life and create the society we want through our actions, and one of the best opportunities is with our food choices every day.
Originally posted on A Humane Nation, Wayne Pacelle’s blog.
In June 2010, the Environmental Defense Fund and its partners in the campaign to reform U.S. law to regulate chemicals made an impassioned plea for American consumers not to be treated like “guinea pigs.” I’d like to remind our friends and colleagues in the environmental and consumer protection communities that advocates for animal protection – while respecting the interests of all animals and believing that none of them should be treated like disposable lab equipment – also care about protecting human health and the environment, and that we all must work together to achieve a future that is both safer and more humane.
It goes without saying that informed decisions regarding chemical safety cannot be made without adequate information (including testing to detect hazardous properties, and information concerning the levels to which humans and wildlife may be exposed). However, simply calling for more data is not the answer; it is also vital that the inadequacies of the current testing paradigm be acknowledged and overcome.
Today’s chemical testing entails animal poisoning studies, most of which were designed decades ago, and which tell us a lot about how large doses of single chemicals affect small animals with short life spans, but very little about how mixtures of chemicals at typically low exposure levels affect larger, longer-living human beings. A rat force fed a chemical for his or her three-year life – often causing painful symptoms such as tumors and organ failure – cannot reliably predict the effects of a human lifetime’s worth of low-level exposure to a “cocktail” of environmental chemicals, which is the situation we’re faced with in the real world.
Animal tests are expensive and time consuming, and their relevance is often questioned by stakeholders on one side or the other. This leads to disputes over which chemicals represent a real threat, and a seemingly bottomless pit of animal testing to “prove” that a chemical is harmful or safe. (Remember the decades-long battle over whether cigarette smoking causes cancer? Today, history is repeating itself with Bisphenol A and other chemicals.) Even in optimum conditions, regulating chemicals on the basis of animal data takes years, and relies heavily on guesswork and unproven assumptions. And at the end of all that, the results can still – rightly – be called into question.
So instead of dealing with chemical safety and animal suffering as two separate issues, The Human Society of the United States (HSUS) and its affiliates are addressing the “guinea pig” problem with one ambitious project.
In 2007, the National Academy of Sciences published a report titled “Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century: A Vision and a Strategy.” In it, a team of eminent scientists (including HSUS staff member Martin Stephens, PhD) established two guiding principles: first, animal testing is of limited value in predicting real-life human health effects of chemicals or for dealing with the current backlog of tens of thousands of chemicals that are being inadequately regulated; and second, a new approach – a paradigm shift – is needed. The Academy advocates moving away from conventional animal test requirements toward a combination of modern computer-based and human-relevant systems biology approaches that can deliver results in days rather than years, and at a small fraction of the cost of animal testing. In fact, many of the participating scientists envision the complete replacement of animal tests, and see this work as prompting a long overdue, and desperately needed, revolution in the regulation of chemicals.
The Human Toxicology Project we are promoting in the United States and globally is, like the Human Genome Project before it, a solution-oriented scientific program that will overhaul the current antiquated testing paradigm so we are no longer treated as guinea pigs – and neither are guinea pigs. It will prevent the horrible effects of testing toxic chemicals on millions of animals, greatly advance our understanding of the effects of chemicals on human biology, and lead to more reliable risk assessment decisions.
