Genetically Modified Animals: Reject Speciesism | Mickey Z.

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Mickey Z. -- World News Trust

March 22, 2013

“Atrocities are no less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research."

- GB Shaw

When my friend Marianne sent me an NPR interview about the thriving business of genetically modified animals, I wasn’t even remotely surprised to witness NPR’s superficial and speciesist perspective.

Effective propaganda systems establish parameters. Thus, if NPR is portrayed as a lair for craven communists while Fox News is seen to represent drooling Neanderthals, anything outside this framework -- in actuality, an extremely narrow framework -- remains unworthy of serious attention.

Which neatly brings me back to Terry Gross of NPR interviewing Emily Anthes, author of Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts.

The code for fluorescent proteins
Predictably, Gross and Anthes share a few giggles over “remote-controlled insects” and a “mouse that has tusks like an elephant,” and a sentient being anointed with the brand name “GloFish.”

GROSS: “So just describe, for those of us who haven't seen one yet, what a glowfish does that's special.”

ANTHES: “So, GloFish is the brand name. The fish are actually technically zebrafish, and they're little, small tropical fish, and they're normally covered in just black and white horizontal stripes. They're native to Southeast Asia. Well, scientists have figured out a way to put special genes in the glowfish that code for fluorescent proteins. And so what happens is these fish's bodies churn out these proteins that essentially glow in the dark ... And so these fish are now widely available, sold for five or six dollars apiece at Petco or Wal-Mart, and they also come with a special GloFish tank that I also purchased, which has these blue and black lights.”

Anthes explains that such atrocities are legal because the fish aren’t meant for human consumption. In the realm of animal derived food (sic) -- a realm responsible for more greenhouse gases than the transportation sector, not incidentally -- cloning is the preferred method of bioengineering.

Just when you thought factory farming couldn’t become more depraved, ranchers and farmers, says Anthes, “see cloning as a great opportunity to make exact genetic replicas of their best performers, of the cows that make the most milk or have the best kind of beef, and to them the prospect of cloning is a lucrative one because they can make a lot of money by duplicating their best animals.”

Speaking of lucrative torture industries, Gross brings up the issue of breeding pigs “so that their organs could be transplanted in human bodies without the human immune system rejecting the organ.”

“The problem,” Anthes confirms, “is rejection.”

The problem these two propagandists conveniently obscure: Animal experimentation is both morally indefensible and scientifically fraudulent.

Putting Descartes before the horse
Millions of dollars have been raised and tens of thousands of humans have been mobilized to assail animal experimentation almost exclusively on moral grounds.

While I believe that, in a sane and compassionate society, a principled appeal should be adequate to end such barbarism, moral stances within the dominant culture are effortlessly quashed by those seeking to justify the laboratory torture of animals on well… "moral" grounds.

"What's more important, your child or some nameless rodent?" they ask.

A potentially more influential tack for activists would be establish that such experiments are not only ethically vacant, but scientifically specious as well.

"The reason why I am against animal research is because it doesn't work,” explains Robert Mendelsohn, M.D. “It has no scientific value and every good scientist knows that."

Aysha Z Akhtar, M.D., M.P.H., a senior medical advisor and Jarrod Bailey, Ph.D., a senior research consultant for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, concur.

“The more we study the relevance of animal tests, the more apparent their shortcomings become,” Akhtar and Bailey wrote in a 2007 letter published in the British Medical Journal. “Even subtle physiological differences between humans and animals can manifest as profound differences in disease physiology and treatment effectiveness and safety. For example, numerous differences in spinal cord physiology and reaction to injury exist between species and even strains within a species. These differences likely contribute to the repeated failure of spinal cord treatments that have tested safe and effective in animals to translate into human benefit.”

In addition, say Akhtar and Bailey, “tests in rodents for predicting human carcinogenicity with a false negative rate approaching two-thirds, potentially caus(ed) widespread human exposure to carcinogens.”

They also point at wonder drugs like Vioxx, which failed to show adverse reactions in animal tests but ended up to be potentially deadly for humans.

“A major shift in our research paradigm is long overdue,” declare Akhtar and Bailey. “The move away from animal experiments toward more accurate methods of studying disease and intervention is scientifically superior and more ethical for humanity, as well as for animals.”

"Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the animals are like us,'” says Professor Charles R. Magel. “Ask the experimenters why it is morally OK to experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the animals are not like us.' Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction."

If animal experimentation is both indefensible cruelty and unsound science, why is it still in widespread use?

Dr. Gundersheimer has a possible answer: "In reality (animal) tests do not provide protection for consumers from unsafe products, but rather they are used to protect corporations from legal liability."

As they say in South Florida: BINGO

For whom the knee jerks
In closing her NPR interview, Emily Anthes warns us against a “general fear of biotechnology” and/or a “knee-jerk reaction against the technology.” This, she opines, would cause us to “lose the good as well as the bad.”

Let’s review some of the “bad”:

• We have nefarious, corporate-funded humans -- hiding behind the cloak of science -- performing barbaric experiments on imprisoned sentient beings.
• We have an immense and lucrative industry devoted to this heinous practice.
• These cruel experiments are of no use in saving human lives and those designed to encourage humans to eat more animals, by definition, are lethal to humans (and the eco-system).
• The big winners in this enterprise are the corporations that rake in higher profits while evading liability.

As for the “good,” well, um… I guess some clueless kid might think glow-in-the-dark pets are neat.

Reality: The bioengineering of animals is yet another gruesome chapter in the ever growing catalog of speciesist crimes inflicted by humans upon their fellow earthlings.

Through our participation or silence, we have each helped create and maintain a culture in which all life is under attack. We willingly consume the corpses of tortured and murdered beings and when we inevitably get sick, we call on science (sic) to torture and murder more beings in a futile attempt to find cures (sic).

Ask yourself this: Even if you could prove (and you can’t) that vivisection may be able to save human lives, are you willing to embrace and endorse premeditated atrocities as the price for such “progress”?

Shift happens
So, how does it end? Please allow me to repeat the two steps I offered in my last article:

• Reject speciesism.
• Respect and defend all earthlings.

If these modifications sound unlikely or even impossible to you: Try tapping into your vast imagination, seeing past the limited choices we’ve been programmed to accept, and choosing to view such adaptations as not only eminently feasible but also as undeniably necessary.

Surrender the privilege of speciesism, embrace empathy for all sentient beings, and allow compassion to guide your choices.

#shifthappens

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Mickey Z. is the author of 11 books, most recently the novel Darker Shade of Green. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on an obscure website called Facebook.

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