Primates, Pigs, and Pit Bulls
Suki Falconberg Ph.D.
October 01, 2007
This September, animal concerns seemed to hit me hard and continuously. The first of the month was International Primate Day, and I read of attempts in Europe to ban experiments upon chimpanzees and monkeys.
Thousands of our fellow primates are imprisoned and tortured in labs, and this mistaken experimentation on them does not lead to cures for humans. For one, the terrible stress, fear, and loneliness that lab monkeys (and, indeed, all imprisoned species—rats, birds, dogs, etc.) experience can skew results. There is a 90% failure rate of prescription drugs tested on animals, and roughly a half a million people a year in the U.S. are hospitalized due to the side effects from such drugs. Second, results simply do not transfer across species.
What we do to the primates is horrific: at one lab in Scotland macaque monkeys were injected with an asthma drug that caused massive swelling of their faces and lips, bloody diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, and abdominal hernias. From labs at Cambridge University to ones in Germany, and in facilities all across the U.S., we torture primates: viruses are injected into their brains; we clamp their heads and then drill holes in their skulls so we can insert electrodes and we attach wires to their eyes; we house them alone in abysmally small cages, thus adding loneliness and neurosis to their distress and fear. Baby monkey have been taken, permanently, from their mothers and given a cloth doll to hold on to. Then in useless experiments even the doll has been taken away--to add more mental misery--or wired up to shock the baby when she tries to hold onto it for succor. Repeatedly, the baby will reach for the doll, and be shocked over and over, so desperate is she for comfort.
Why we do all of this I am not sure? Researchers subsidize their academic careers with grant money (sometimes to the tune of hundreds of thousand of dollars) that allows them to perform all these worthless procedures. But, aside from money, just sheer human sadism is probably the most accurate answer.
In comments by various European parliament members, I notice they stress that these primates can feel fear and a range of emotions and that they are intelligent—reasons we should not experiment upon them. I would apply these criteria to all the animals we have imprisoned in our labs. Rats feel fear and express affection and are highly intelligent. Not that I would use ‘intelligence’ as an excuse not to torture an animal (the animal’s intelligence, not ours--obviously: we have already proven that we are beyond stupidity by the sheer fact that we are the torturers). It would be the same as saying let’s not inflict pain on an adult human with the intelligence of a child—as if that were the only measuring stick for holding back our torturing ways.
Let’s not torture anything that can feel pain. That makes far more humane commonsense.
The only reason we can inflict such pain is that we are stronger.
All animals are the same. All life has the same value. Every rat’s life is as precious to her as mine is to me.
Which brings me to a recent truck accident on a highway near my home where pigs on the way to slaughter were either injured or killed when the vehicle overturned. Those still packed in the truck screamed with fear; some wandered by the highway, lost; some tried to escape; some were either dying or already dead. Bodies, bleeding, were in a heap. The animals were regarded as ‘cargo’—not worth any humane consideration.
The ‘cutesy’ title of the local newspaper article was “When Pigs Fly” and there was a jokey comment about how the animals met their end a bit prematurely. Not prematurely enough since it would have been better if they had never been born--considering the way they were ‘raised’ under conditions which would make a concentration camp seem like a posh resort. Among other tortures, they are confined in spaces too small for them to even turn around; their tails are bloody infected messes from other pigs biting at them due to stress and misery; they are forced to live constantly in the overwhelming stench of their own urine and excrement; they never see sunlight, or feel the soft air outside their prisons; they scream constantly in a kind of cry of ongoing insanity; their eyes are so full of pain you cannot even look into them. This just touches the surface of what they endure on the way to becoming ‘meat.’
It was also the month when the Michael Vick case received a lot of attention. This American football player who participated in the sport of dog fighting and strangled and electrocuted dogs that failed to perform is no more guilty of cruelty to animals than is the average meat-eating American. Less so, since his is a conscious decision: cruelty as sport. The unconscious cruelty of those who eat bacon is far more objectionable. It is simply accepted: that the pig must live and die under conditions too barbaric to even describe—so that you can have your mouthful of bacon. Banality of selfish evil at its most obvious.
Whoopi Goldberg stirred up a bit of controversy on The View when she pointed out, in a practical way, that dog fighting is simply a part of Vick’s culture. Whoopi is quite right. In fact, it is a part of many people’s ‘culture’ since it is a thriving activity (illegal or not) across the U.S. in both rural and urban areas. You are as likely to find men betting on this brutal, fun-for-profit sport in corners of Los Angeles as in the Deep South.
It is no more cruel than the institution of factory farming—the vast torture system that produces the meat, milk, and eggs for your table. Maybe less so since Vick’s dogs were probably allowed some mobility and a few moments out of hell. There is no moment out of hell for the pig who is factory farmed.
How deeply damaged they are comes from a woman I know who has rescued several. She reports that any noise which even resembles the ‘farm’ where they were raised sends the pigs screaming and running with fear.
Legalizing’ the torture and murder of 10 billion ‘food’ animals (pigs, cows, chickens) a year in the U. S. makes Vick’s transgression seem rather paltry. In fact, I would say that this ‘legalized cruelty’ is morally despicable at a level far above his crime.
As I saw the ‘cargo’ being prodded and rounded up on the highway, with bleeding or dying pigs left to simply suffer, I wondered what the local news would have made of a truckload of dogs so treated? Would they have made jokes?
Dogs—raised for food or fur—are treated, by the way, with the same indifference in China and Korea, where their pain is simply a taken-for-granted ‘joke.’ I have seen them slaughtered through strangling, drowning, or electrocution as their murderers chat, smile, smoke, laugh, take it all quite casually—just a day’s work.
During transport, pigs are packed so tightly that some die en route—and during the winter, the skin of the ones rammed against the walls freezes to the side of the truck. No gentleness is used to unstick them: men simply tear the animals off the wall--or use a knife to razor off the flesh--leaving bloody, raw patches behind. This is the ‘norm’ of cruelty—so you can have your bacon. I have more respect for Vick, the dog torturer, than I do for the average bacon eater.
Down the road from the pigs that didn’t matter, there was a vet’s office where a dog was being treated with TLC. Where were all the vets in town, when this truck overturned? Why weren’t they on the spot, euthanizing the pigs who could not be saved—and transporting those who could to a safe soothing place, where they could heal them, tenderly, with kind words, the way they do the dogs they look after with such gentleness?
Suki Falconberg, © 2007
Thousands of our fellow primates are imprisoned and tortured in labs, and this mistaken experimentation on them does not lead to cures for humans. For one, the terrible stress, fear, and loneliness that lab monkeys (and, indeed, all imprisoned species—rats, birds, dogs, etc.) experience can skew results. There is a 90% failure rate of prescription drugs tested on animals, and roughly a half a million people a year in the U.S. are hospitalized due to the side effects from such drugs. Second, results simply do not transfer across species.
What we do to the primates is horrific: at one lab in Scotland macaque monkeys were injected with an asthma drug that caused massive swelling of their faces and lips, bloody diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, and abdominal hernias. From labs at Cambridge University to ones in Germany, and in facilities all across the U.S., we torture primates: viruses are injected into their brains; we clamp their heads and then drill holes in their skulls so we can insert electrodes and we attach wires to their eyes; we house them alone in abysmally small cages, thus adding loneliness and neurosis to their distress and fear. Baby monkey have been taken, permanently, from their mothers and given a cloth doll to hold on to. Then in useless experiments even the doll has been taken away--to add more mental misery--or wired up to shock the baby when she tries to hold onto it for succor. Repeatedly, the baby will reach for the doll, and be shocked over and over, so desperate is she for comfort.
Why we do all of this I am not sure? Researchers subsidize their academic careers with grant money (sometimes to the tune of hundreds of thousand of dollars) that allows them to perform all these worthless procedures. But, aside from money, just sheer human sadism is probably the most accurate answer.
In comments by various European parliament members, I notice they stress that these primates can feel fear and a range of emotions and that they are intelligent—reasons we should not experiment upon them. I would apply these criteria to all the animals we have imprisoned in our labs. Rats feel fear and express affection and are highly intelligent. Not that I would use ‘intelligence’ as an excuse not to torture an animal (the animal’s intelligence, not ours--obviously: we have already proven that we are beyond stupidity by the sheer fact that we are the torturers). It would be the same as saying let’s not inflict pain on an adult human with the intelligence of a child—as if that were the only measuring stick for holding back our torturing ways.
Let’s not torture anything that can feel pain. That makes far more humane commonsense.
The only reason we can inflict such pain is that we are stronger.
All animals are the same. All life has the same value. Every rat’s life is as precious to her as mine is to me.
Which brings me to a recent truck accident on a highway near my home where pigs on the way to slaughter were either injured or killed when the vehicle overturned. Those still packed in the truck screamed with fear; some wandered by the highway, lost; some tried to escape; some were either dying or already dead. Bodies, bleeding, were in a heap. The animals were regarded as ‘cargo’—not worth any humane consideration.
The ‘cutesy’ title of the local newspaper article was “When Pigs Fly” and there was a jokey comment about how the animals met their end a bit prematurely. Not prematurely enough since it would have been better if they had never been born--considering the way they were ‘raised’ under conditions which would make a concentration camp seem like a posh resort. Among other tortures, they are confined in spaces too small for them to even turn around; their tails are bloody infected messes from other pigs biting at them due to stress and misery; they are forced to live constantly in the overwhelming stench of their own urine and excrement; they never see sunlight, or feel the soft air outside their prisons; they scream constantly in a kind of cry of ongoing insanity; their eyes are so full of pain you cannot even look into them. This just touches the surface of what they endure on the way to becoming ‘meat.’
It was also the month when the Michael Vick case received a lot of attention. This American football player who participated in the sport of dog fighting and strangled and electrocuted dogs that failed to perform is no more guilty of cruelty to animals than is the average meat-eating American. Less so, since his is a conscious decision: cruelty as sport. The unconscious cruelty of those who eat bacon is far more objectionable. It is simply accepted: that the pig must live and die under conditions too barbaric to even describe—so that you can have your mouthful of bacon. Banality of selfish evil at its most obvious.
Whoopi Goldberg stirred up a bit of controversy on The View when she pointed out, in a practical way, that dog fighting is simply a part of Vick’s culture. Whoopi is quite right. In fact, it is a part of many people’s ‘culture’ since it is a thriving activity (illegal or not) across the U.S. in both rural and urban areas. You are as likely to find men betting on this brutal, fun-for-profit sport in corners of Los Angeles as in the Deep South.
It is no more cruel than the institution of factory farming—the vast torture system that produces the meat, milk, and eggs for your table. Maybe less so since Vick’s dogs were probably allowed some mobility and a few moments out of hell. There is no moment out of hell for the pig who is factory farmed.
How deeply damaged they are comes from a woman I know who has rescued several. She reports that any noise which even resembles the ‘farm’ where they were raised sends the pigs screaming and running with fear.
Legalizing’ the torture and murder of 10 billion ‘food’ animals (pigs, cows, chickens) a year in the U. S. makes Vick’s transgression seem rather paltry. In fact, I would say that this ‘legalized cruelty’ is morally despicable at a level far above his crime.
As I saw the ‘cargo’ being prodded and rounded up on the highway, with bleeding or dying pigs left to simply suffer, I wondered what the local news would have made of a truckload of dogs so treated? Would they have made jokes?
Dogs—raised for food or fur—are treated, by the way, with the same indifference in China and Korea, where their pain is simply a taken-for-granted ‘joke.’ I have seen them slaughtered through strangling, drowning, or electrocution as their murderers chat, smile, smoke, laugh, take it all quite casually—just a day’s work.
During transport, pigs are packed so tightly that some die en route—and during the winter, the skin of the ones rammed against the walls freezes to the side of the truck. No gentleness is used to unstick them: men simply tear the animals off the wall--or use a knife to razor off the flesh--leaving bloody, raw patches behind. This is the ‘norm’ of cruelty—so you can have your bacon. I have more respect for Vick, the dog torturer, than I do for the average bacon eater.
Down the road from the pigs that didn’t matter, there was a vet’s office where a dog was being treated with TLC. Where were all the vets in town, when this truck overturned? Why weren’t they on the spot, euthanizing the pigs who could not be saved—and transporting those who could to a safe soothing place, where they could heal them, tenderly, with kind words, the way they do the dogs they look after with such gentleness?
Suki Falconberg, © 2007
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