Their hands and teeth drip the blood of their victims: they live on a radioactive pile of money

Very sad news. Governor Walker did not veto the sections in the Assembly Bill that exempted animal researchers from our Wisconsin State Animal Cruelty Statutes and now federal officials okayed the plan to roundup and kill up to 350 geese (http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/article.php?article=33870 ) here in Madison.

See http://allanimals.org/ and http://allanimalsblog.org/ for more information. Please call Mayor Soglin's office, 266-4611 & email: mayor@cityofmadison.com
him to ask him not to allow this inhumane round up to go ahead. http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/article.php?article=33870  

If you are a Madison citizen, please sign this online petition: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/stopmadisongoosekill/

Thank you also to Capital Times reporter Shawn Doherty http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/environment/article_d8847e5e-a066-11e0-8dd8-001cc4c002e0.html (also in the Wed Cap Times print edition) for reporting on another fast track program to allow more trapping in our county parks. 

Check out the "double speak" expressions used by George Meyer, Dan Wisniewski, Virgil Shroeder and Darren Marsh to "convince"  us that trapping is a "legitimate recreational opportunity", "compatible", "harvesting" and that "modern day traps are more humane" and refers to the "extremes" in this discussion. 

I think it's ridiculous to describe those who oppose the inhumanity of trapping, an activity that causes immense suffering and terror to other living beings as being "extreme". For too long such statements as these have gone unchallenged by the public. We have remained silent. the cruelty inherent in trapping cannot be better addressed than through quotes of great thinker, whom we would hardly refer to as "extreme":

Thoreau: "The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest".

Mark Twain: "Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it."

Leo Tolstoy: "If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals."

Many other great thinkers have commented on our treatment of animals: George Bernard Shaw, Victor Hugo, Abraham Lincoln, Robert Browning, Albert Schweitzer, Charles Darwin, Buddha, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther king Jr., Thomas Edison,.......

I plan on listing more quotes next time and recommend a book "In Pity and In Anger" by John Vyvyan, which describes the time when vivisection (animal experimentation) gradually became institutionalized and moved into secrecy, behind the closed doors of the laboratories, where only "inspectors" can see what goes on and it received protection by the law.

This is when the great minds outside of the scientific community opposed it. There is still opposition to it today and scientific evidence of its invalidity, which now the corporate media ignores....and the public remains unaware...
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Today's June 30th WYOU "Animals Have Rights" 10pm-11:30 pm on www.wyou.org, livestream and at Cable 95 and Digital 991 Also repeats on Tues July 5th at 4 am

Today's WYOU episodes will be a repeat from last week, featuring an episode from May 18th, 2009's Rick & Leslie Show, with an excerpted portion of the documentary "Chattel". 

I was channel surfing in 2004 because I couldn't stand those annoying pharmaceutical commercials and found WYOU with this documentary being shown. That's how I first found out about this issue and then read Bill Lueders' Isthmus article "Inside the Monkey House". Both made such an impact on me that I became involved in trying to let others know about this issue. Here in Dane County, we have over 9,000 monkeys being experimented on, more than anywhere else in the world!

And yet most of the public has no idea this is going on. The researchers keep claiming that what they do is "humane" and necessary to cure human disease, yet they didn't want a citizens advisory board or any public discussion last year about their experiments, many of them which we pay for! So to protect themselves from possible prosecution, they slipped such an exemption into a budget bill.

That's why I decided to show this episode with Chattel, followed at 11 by "Unnecessary Fuss", which shows researchers' own footage shot inside the University of Pennsylvania's Head Injury Clinic in Philadelphia in 1983-1984. The researchers inflict brain damage on unanesthisized baboons with a hydraulic device- to study head injuries caused by car & sports accidents.

60 hours of videotape were removed from a lab by the Animal Liberation Front, and it was edited down to this 26 minute version by PETA. Ingrid Newkirk does the "voice over"  commentary. This was distributed to the media and to Congress.

 Contents of the film

Deborah Blum writes that "it is difficult to put into words just how ugly [this] brief movie is."^[6]

The film shows at least one sedated but not anesthetized baboon with his wrists and ankles tied, strapped to an operating table, his shaved head secured with dental cement inside a helmet. A hydraulic device known as Penn 2 slams the baboon's head from behind, pushing it forward at a 60-degree angle with a force of what the researchers said was up to 1000 g, apparently intended to simulate whiplash. ^[7][8]

After the injury is sustained, the baboon's head is dislodged from the helmet using a hammer and screwdriver. One sequence shows part of the baboon's ear being torn off along with the helmet. After pulling the baboon's head from the helmet, the researcher is heard to laugh, saying: "It's a boy," then, "Looks like I left a little ear behind."^[9]

The footage shows the researchers laughing at injured baboons, performing electrocautery on an apparently conscious baboon, smoking cigarettes and pipes during surgery, and playing loud music as the animals are injured. A researcher is seen holding a seriously injured baboon up to the camera, while others speak to the animal: "Don't be shy now, sir, nothing to be afraid of," followed by laughter, and "He says, 'you're gonna rescue me from this, aren't you? Aren't you?'," followed by more laughter.^[9][6]

While one baboon was being injured on the operating table by the hydraulic device, the camera panned to a brain-damaged, drooling monkey strapped into a high chair in a corner of the room, with the words "Cheerleading in the corner, we have B-10. B-10 wishes his counterpart well. As you can see, B-10 is still alive. B-10 is hoping for a good result," followed by laughter. In another sequence, one researcher is heard to say: "You better hope the ... anti-vivisection people don't get a hold of this film." ^[10]

University response
The university responded that the film was a "caricature" of what had taken place in the laboratory. Shortly after the ALF raid and before PETA had released the footage, Dr. Thomas Langfitt, chief investigator at the Head Injury Clinic and chair of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital's department of neurosurgery, denied there had been abuse in the laboratory, telling the Philadelphia Daily News that the animals had been treated humanely and that "[r]esearchers would never laugh at the apes. We treat the baboons the way we treat human beings."^[11]

OPRR investigation
An investigation was conducted by 18 veterinarians from the American College of Laboratory Animal Medicine, commissioned by the Office for Protection from Research Risks (OPRR). Charles R. McCarthy, director of the OPRR at the time, wrote that "[d]espite the fact that Unnecessary Fuss grossly overstated the deficiencies in the Head Injury Clinic, OPRR found many extraordinarily serious violations of the Guide for Care and Use of Laboratory Animals ... Furthermore, OPRR found deficiencies in the procedures for care of animals in many other laboratories operated under the auspices of the university."^[3]

The violations included that the depth of anesthetic coma was questionable; that most of the animals were not seen by a veterinarian either before or after surgery, survival surgical techniques were not carried out in the required aseptic manner; that the operating theater was not properly cleaned; and that smoking was allowed in the operating theater despite the presence of oxygen tanks.^[12][8]

When PETA made its 26-minute film available, the OPRR initially refused to investigate because the film had been edited from 60 hours of videotape. For over a year PETA refused to release the original footage. When they eventually handed over the unedited material, the OPRR discovered that the footage of the brain damage being inflicted involved just one baboon out of the 150 who had received the Penn 2 injuries. The film gave the impression that the brain-damage scenes involved several animals.^[3]

The OPRR identified 25 errors in Newkirk's voice-over commentary. One example was where an accidental water spill over a conscious baboon during a surgical procedure was identified, incorrectly, by one of the Head Injury Clinic's researchers, and subsequently by Newkirk, as "perhaps acid."^[13][8]

Sit-in and clinic's closure

After a three-day sit-in by animal-rights activists at the National Institutes of Health, and the personal intervention of margaret Heckler, then Health and Human Services secretary, the government concluded that the violations seen on the footage were sufficient to justify the clinic's closure.^[12] The OPRR also found deficiencies in other laboratories operated by the university. The university's chief veterinarian was fired, new training programs were initiated, and the university was placed on probation, with quarterly progress reports to OPRR required.

References

Unnecessary Fuss Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, the video composed of footage taken from the lab by the Animal Liberation Front

• McCarthy, Charles. R. "Reflections on the Organizational Locus of the Office for Protection from Research Risks", The Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science at Case Western Reserve University, undated, retrieved February 26, 2006
• Newkirk, Ingrid. Free the Animals. Lantern Books, 2000. ISBN 1-930051-22-0
• Newkirk, Ingrid & Pacheco, Alex. Unnecessary Fuss, video, 26 minutes, available from PETA. http://www.petacatalog.org/prodinfo.asp?number=VP507&variation=&aitem=1&mitem=1
• Sideris, Lisa, McCarthy, Charles, & Smith, David H. "Roots of Concern with Nonhuman Animals in Biomedical Ethics", Institute for Laboratory Animal Research Journal, V40(1)

We don't have any such footage from Madison. Maybe it's because the UW-Madison destroyed 628 primate videotapes in 2006 after local citizens asked for a copy of just one of them. They claimed that there was a steam pipe valve leak which damaged these tapes. But instead of trying to salvage them, they called in Pellitteri Waste Systems to shred them as well. Bill Lueders was the only one to report this. http://www.isthmus.com/isthmus/article.php?article=2012  (Primate tapes get trashed) check out also the related article links on the right side. Don't you wonder why they destroyed these tapes and what was on them?

Whistleblowers like Matt Rossell and a few courageous reporters like Bill Lueders exposing this issue, there would be no awareness of what is going on behind the closed doors of the animal laboratories. The animals have no voice but ours, they have no one looking out for them, especially now if this provision exempting researchers from anti-cruelty laws becomes law. Please forward this email and links to others, and ask them to also call Scott Walker's office before June 30. Please.

 Links to Thursday's show: Rick & Leslie's 5/18/09 episode with Chattel http://www.vimeo.com/6274651 and a 16:35 partial clip of "Unnecessary Fuss"  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3399696296191962720 

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Martin Luther King-"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

George Orwell -"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

Edmund Burke- "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

Albert Einstein-"It has become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity."

Elie Wiesel- "Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

Albert Schweitzer- " The quiet conscience is the invention of the devil. No one of us may permit any preventable pain to be inflicted, even though the responsibility for that pain is not ours. No one may shut his eyes and think that the pain which is therefore not visible, is non-existent."     

From Ann Emerson. Ann is a diligent activist and member of AFA who regularly sends updates on what's going on in Madison.