By Stuart Chaifetz

As we end this year and prepare to welcome a new one, I want to reflect for a moment on the origins and future of the ARISE Anti-Vivisection campaign.

Prior to ARISE, I spent nearly two decades fighting against hunting, including the last four years working politically for animals. In the back of my mind, however, I always thought that someday I should try to help animals that are experimented on, for their suffering was truly terrifying to behold. But there was just too much work to be done and too little time to spare for any new ventures, so this remained unrealized. That changed in February of this year, when I received an email with a picture of a dog being vivisected.

By Stuart Chaifetz

When animal experiments are proposed, there are a series of steps that are supposed to occur to test the worthiness of the project. This is especially true in an academic setting.

This year, Yale and the University of Chicago performed nearly the exact same experiments, which were designed to weigh the effect of “loneliness” on small mammals who were given cancer. The Yale study used Norway Rats, while the U of C used genetically engineered mice. Both found a link between isolation and cancer, which was then extrapolated to human beings, leading to news stories titled like this: “Lonely women could be at greater risk of breast cancer”

There is so much wrong here I can barely find the words to express myself. Fine. I’ll use this guy’s words instead:

“Ed Yong, of Cancer Research UK, said: "This study was done in rats.

"Overall, research in humans does not suggest there is a direct link between stress and breast cancer.”

Simple, concise and right on point; it is nonsensical to have used rats to judge human reactions, especially when we already knew from human data what the true effects were. Okay, so the Yale study was pointless. What about the U of C experiment?

Now this is where it gets really interesting. It turns out that that story was picked up by the British press, and in response the British National Health Service (NHS) devoted an entire page to a discussion of the experiment.

By Stuart Chaifetz

Testosterone. Yeah, that’s right, I’ve got some - you want to fight about it? C’mon, I’ll take on you, your ugly brother, all his ugly friends, and anyone they ever had lunch with! GGGGGRRRRrrrrrrrrrrr....

We all know that having too much testosterone makes a person more aggressive and prone to violence. We know this because of experiments performed on animals. That’s right; a vivisector castrated a bunch of rats, they became less hostile, and lack of testosterone was the given reason why. They used animals, so it must be right...

Now mind you, it never occurred to the ‘scientists’ involved that the act of castration itself might instill enough fear in the rats to drive out any aggression they had (for the men reading this blog - just imagine a giant monster in a lab coat cutting your [censored] off with something the size of a scimitar, and you’ll understand what those poor rats went through).

At this point you are asking, and quite fairly, where am I going with this?

By Stuart Chaifetz

Of Baboons, Butchers and the Best of Science

A very interesting turn of events occurred at Oklahoma State University last week. “Anthrax study rejected by OSU” tells how the President of the University stopped an anthrax test that would have killed a number of baboons.

The real hero of the story appears to be Madeleine Pickens, who “...threatened to redirect a $5 million donation to the vet school because she did not agree with such practices.”

Good for her! Of course those who experiment on animals didn’t handle the news very well, as we can see in this blog post from one student. I guess he missed the memo where, for PR sake, young vivisectors are supposed to hide all that rage and anger they have. If one day we see this guy on a PETA hidden camera smacking a few animals around in the lab, I for one would not be surprised.

By Stuart Chaifetz

There’s been a lot in the news recently regarding Pharmaceutical companies and related issues, so, instead of focusing on one specific story, this time I am going to hit a few at a time.

I’ve written a lot about Big Pharma and their business practices. In this story from the NY Times, November 15, “Drug Makers Raise Prices in Face of Health Care Reform” we see how Big Pharma is preparing for health care reform by socking consumers with major hikes in prices.

“In the last year, the industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by about 9 percent, according to industry analysts. That will add more than $10 billion to the nation’s drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of inflation for drug prices since 1992.”

By Stuart Chaifetz

If you like this blog, and the other work that we do with the ARISE campaign, then please consider joining or making a donation to our mother organization, the Animal Protection League of NJ. APLNJ (formerly NJ Animal Rights Alliance) is a grass-roots group that has been fighting for animals for more than 25 years. Any donation you can make will truly be appreciated! http://aplnj.org/donation.htm

Thank you!

Animal Protection League of NJ

www.AskUsWhy.com

And now back to our regularly scheduled blog.

By Stuart Chaifetz

Tales from the Dark Side of Big Pharma, Part 14,638

The Never Ending Story

When I started the “Dark Side of Big Pharma” series, I envisioned three or four blogs that dealt with fraud and corruption within the Pharmaceutical industry. I thought that under this banner I could take a little time and explore the human ramifications of drug testing, and then go back to more animal centric experimentation.

Once I began to research these issues, and saw how seemingly endless the controversies regarding Human Clinical Trials and fraud were, what started out as “Dark Side” I, II, III, expanded quickly to IV, V, and then threatened to escalate to blogs X, XX and that most interesting of all Roman numeral combinations, good ol’ XXX (perhaps then I would have found a ‘happy ending’ to this series).