7 Central; Animal rights; 114

Do. [test tone] [background music] Many believe we need to use animals in scientific research in order to find a cure for human ills. Others say such use is wrong cruel and wasteful. In such a black and white argument, is there a middle ground between mice and men. I'm Dave Iverson welcome to 7:00 Central. Since the beginning of time human beings

have always relied on animals as workers, companions, sources of food and clothing. But in recent years animals have also provided another service to humankind. They've been quite literally our guinea pigs. In the laboratory animals have played an essential role in medical science, whether it's in the fight against aging or AIDS, millions of animals have died so that we may learn more about ourselves. But should they or are too many animals being sacrificed in the name of medical science. That's the question we explore on tonight 7:00 Central produced by Linda Friend it's called Of Mice and Men. [background noise] Oh. We use a number of animal models to study methods of preserving various organs: hearts, kidneys, pancreas', and livers. [Reporter] University of Wisconsin medical professor Dr.

James Southerd supervises a liver transplant operation in a baby pig. The liver itself was removed from another pig just 24 hours ago. That's important because traditionally organ transplants must take place almost immediately. The surgery will test how effectively a new organ preservation solution will work. [Guest]Traditionally we use about 2-3 hundred large animals per year for organ transplantation. This is the 40th pig to undergo this surgery at the Medical School and one of over eighty nine thousand animals a year the University of Wisconsin uses for animal research Last year Southerd used dogs for his transplant experiment. But pig anatomy is actually closer to the human model. We're using the pig model because there seems to be some differences between the dog and the human situation. [Guest]She was growing paler and paler and in the hot weather

last year, and we were told in October of last year that there was nothing more that they could do. [Host]Carrie Everett's 4 year old daughter Charlotte was born with multiple heart defects. She needs a heart lung transplant the kind of surgery University of Wisconsin physicians are working to perfect. Not surprisingly, Carrie Everett is passionate about the need for animal research. [Guest] When you're sittin' there and you're being told that your daughter is gonna die. Our Charlotte is going to die. You do anything. Anything you can, to make sure that the research doesn't stop. And that these doctors have the means To get the job done. [Guest] Inside what, inside the balloon? [Child] Inside everything of something, something you like, or toys our stuff, or something like that. That Charlotte is even alive today, her mother says, is testimony to the value of animal research. Last fall Charlotte underwent a risky heart surgery that

utilized techniques perfected on animals. There is nothing that can compare to sitting in that waiting room, and her life is in the doctor's hands. It's almost unbelievable, and he brought her back. With much much more time. Carrie Everett now works for a group called the incurably ill for animal research. And, have you heard from the congressman, back the one I wrote to, no not yet. OK. Everett's group lobbies Congress on behalf of animal research, promoting the cause of children, like Charlotte. I have a lot of dreams for Charlotte, believe it or not I want to go through the teen years. with her. Last year at this time I didn't see that, now I have a hope. We have optimism. Isn't that worth a few animals.

Worth a few lab animals. I think so. How many times have you heard the claim that every single medical advance was the result of animal based research Lawrence Carter is a one time poster child for the United Cerebral Palsy foundation. He used to raise money for research based on animal experiments. But now he believes such research is morally wrong. He now works for an animal rights organization called the health care consumer network. But if you were to become incurably ill or disabled you would miraculously come to your senses, understanding the error of your ways and embrace animal... ... One Two Three Four..Right. Very neat. OK now Dr.. Five Six Seven Eight No need for...Kay may be right.

correlate. Around the world, animal rights activists have protested loudly and effectively calling attention to what they see as the inhumane treatment of animals used for laboratory research. From Sweden - we have animal rights laws. We treat animals as friends not as things, and we judge people much by how they treat their animals. My consciousness has been raised by the animal rights movement there's absolutely no question about that. Dr. Ted Goodfriend is a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin and a medical consultant to Wisconsin Public Television. A leading researcher in the field of hypertension, Goodfriend believes animal experimentation can play an important part in solving complicated mysteries like cancer. The phenomenon and the diseases are so complex. That only a well integrated functioning living organism can reproduce them. So at the moment we don't have anything

better. To justify the use of animals in research it's often easier to point to the past rather than the future. That's because we don't know if today's experiments will provide the key to mysteries yet unsolved. What we do know is what's been accomplished. Discoveries, like the polio vaccine. And the Nobel Prize was granted to three men who discovered how to grow viruses like the polio virus in living cells. Viruses grow only in living cells. They happened to get these cells from monkey kidneys. The price that was paid was the sacrifice of many monkeys to obtain the kidney cells on which the virus was grown. I'm sorry it cost the lives of monkeys but I'm glad to have the vaccine. Today, we're still awaiting the research breakthroughs that will solve the mysteries of cancer, aging or AIDS. Along the way,

there will be more failures than success, which makes it tougher to justify sacrificing the lives of research animals. It's very difficult to advocate using people or animals to study something when we don't really know that by studying it we will cure it or understand it. And we really don't know what the future has. It's hard to advocate what may be a failure but most of these projects turn out to fall short of our our hopes and far short of our goals. And lacking splashy success stories the labs themselves have sometimes turned into targets. Early in the morning of April 20th 1985, Sixteen members of the Animal Liberation Front deactivated the security system at the University of California at Riverside and removed the interior doors. They rescued hundreds of animals including house cats, rabbits, pigeons, mice and possums.

Radical animal rights activists have broken into labs they suspect violate the rules of the Animal Welfare Act. This film was distributed to the media by PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. In this break-in, Animal Liberation Front members removed cats and baby monkeys who had had their eyes sewn shut, animals used to study blindness in children. Instead of working with the blind in a harmless environment, experimenters chose to create blindness in animals. Other labs across the country have also been raided by animal rights organizations. The Animal Liberation Front broke into this lab at the University of Pennsylvania, stole research films, and released them to the media. Dxo you. his injury. These graphic scenes were enough to convince the National Institute of Health to suspend funding to this particular lab. But the activities of radical animal rights activists in general have also

served to unnerve the entire research community. That it's uncomfortable to be told that you are causing pain and suffering in animals or parasites or whatever, when you originally joined this occupation to alleviate suffering so that, that's part of the discomfort. Another part of the discomfort is the fear that we all have for our bodies or our persons in the face of the violent attacks that are made on us by, um, the extremists and the animal rights movement. I frankly admit to you, um, I fear for my personhood and my property. But illegal break-ins do not constitute the entire animal rights movement. It draws upon philosophy professors, as well. Gandhi said that you can judge the character of a society by how its animals are treated. You can, it's like a metaphor for the whole society. America

gets bad grades, I think, on that standard. Tom Regan is a professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University and a leader in the animal rights movement. Part of the challenge, again, of the animal rights movement is to help people reconceptualize what an animal is. And the dominant conception we have is that whatever they are they're here for us and it's mighty nice of them to contribute to humanity's, uh, welfare. Regan believes that the way to study human health is to study humans, not animals. The money that needs to be spent needs to be spent on human beings who are having these problems not on so-called animal models. Who, who, who had done nothing, done nothing, except have the mistake made, you know, the the bad luck of showing up in a laboratory.uh The vast majority of research that's unethical, inhumane, cruel does not have to be done.

And the animal rights movement has also drawn a few allies from the medical world. Dr. William Wittert is a Chicago pediatrician. He believes some animal research is worthwhile, but questions its degree and frequency. There's been a tradition of the animal experimentation. It's an old boys club. It's that's the way you do it. That's the way it's been done, that's what validates it. That's what pays the salaries, that's how you get NIH money. That's how you spend this 3 billion dollars a year. Animal Research News says this is a multi-billion dollar industry. And Wittert points out that dramatic breakthroughs don't always depend on animal experimentation. The discovery of x-rays, the discovery of penicillin, how hormones work, hormonal treatment of breast cancer, prostate cancer, um, the discovery of the AIDS virus. These are all, this is all, information obtained without the use of animal experimentation. The question of whether or not to save a rat's life or a human's life is a ridiculous question. It's an absurd question, because that's not what it

boils down to. In fact one could make arguments frequently that the money spent on research, the wasted money, could be much better applied to other forms of research. Indeed some scientists question whether animal research is even reliable research. After all what works on a rat may not in a human being. Human systems are distinctly different from animal systems. For instance, if one tests a certain drug on one hamster species, it's absolutely safe. And if one tested on a very related hamster species, all the animals die. And if you test it on people God knows what happens, because there is no relationship or very little relationship. I, at the moment, don't know of any satisfactory substitute for that unless it's testing in people. And it's very, it's very difficult to convince a person to try a new drug that could be highly toxic, if it has never been tested in any other living organism,

like a mouse. It's very, it's not easy to get people to do that. And animal testing includes not only research into the mysteries of the body, but also the mind. One of the most controversial aspects of animal research involves the use of primates in psychological studies. This is Rat and this is the father. Left side is Wong . Dr Charles Snowdon and Dr. Tina Widowski are primate researchers at the University of Wisconsin. They'll start fighting over the chicken. The trouble with big families is sibling rivalry. Then when it comes to chicken, they tend to fight over it. This is Rat. He's the dad. By observing how monkeys interact, Snowden and Widowski hope to learn more about both animal behavior and that of their human counterparts. This is one of the ?ropes? I felt that the small number of monogamous monkeys in the world and to the extent

that humans are monogamous, these potentially could tell us a great deal about about monogamous animals. This species of monkey comes from the rain forests of South America. Its natural habitat is being destroyed. But this captive population has thrived and even multiplied. This is also a species where we have three times as many animals living in captive environments that we know about than live in the wild. This is a species that's being preserved primarily through research and education programs [?] Snowden and Widowski's research requires observation, but not painful or invasive experimentation. It was the only work we were allowed to photograph at the university's psychology lab. There are certain things that I feel comfortable doing and I've shown that to you, today. There are other things that I personally don't feel comfortable doing but I can accept the need for other people to do it. It is those other things done by other people that animal rights activists

especially object to, research that on this university campus includes how monkeys are affected by social deprivation, maternal separation and alcohol consumption. Of all experimentation that is the most useless, psych experimentation is by far and away the worst in my opinion. We get no data from animals. Nothing that couldn't be inferred or studied from people. Physician Wittert and philosopher Regan believe animals deserve a better fate. They're our closest brothers, cousins or whatever. So if you you think about about them in those terms and then you see them in situations where, uh, they have been, for the interest of some scientific project, forced to become drug addicts, uh, forced to become, uh, alcoholics, forced into situations of maternal deprivation, you know, where youngsters are taken from their mothers at birth and raised in isolation and it's extraordinarily offensive. [Multiple voices]: If they holler, let them know, the

primate lab has got to go. [crowd clapping] [Woman addressing crowd] The uselessness and the fact that we are keeping highly intelligent creatures penned up for their entire lives and this over here says they can live 35 years. And cycling 'em through one experience, experiment after the other, after the other, after the other to prove what we already know. Comes close. Is senseless. Is a waste of dollars. Is a waste of the lives of these creatures. Primate researcher Snowden acknowledges that animal behavior may not always apply to human beings. But he believes observation of these monkeys can tell us a lot about instinctive behavior, the kind of behavior that has not been shaped by civilization or cultural bias. In other words we can learn a good deal from monkeys. One of the aspects that's very common to monogamous animals is that the whole family gets involved in infant care. We've tended to make it the providence of females only in human

society; but if we really are monogamous, these types of data suggest that the infant care should be a family affair, not just restricted to the mother in the family. That's one aspect in which can be useful to us. [Protestors]: No more torture. No more pain. Stop the psych lab's dirty game. [Host]: In the angry debate over animal rights, there is rarely room for compromise. But away from the picket lines, some researchers think there is a middle ground. The program wants to know what kind of an animal do I want to look at. It wants to know what kind of a climate am I going to have that animal in. It's new technology that may provide a bridge between the two camps. Dr. Warren Porter is a zoologist at the University of Wisconsin. Porter says computers can both spare the lives of animals and provide more efficient research. It would take me a week to do a single data point, and I'm looking here at hundreds of data points. So computers are ?tr...?

really shortening the time it takes us to find out new, new pieces of information. So 20 years ago we couldn't have done this. It would be totally impossible. Porter runs metabolism experiments on his computer to explore the connection between pesticide exposure and immune system disorders in both animals and people. But Porter adds that computers cannot eliminate animal research altogether. Computer models depend on the information that's fed into them and that preliminary data comes from experiments that utilize mice and rats. These are cages where we have white rats, which are drinking very low levels of compounds, insecticide, herbicides, which are, in some cases, lower than what's in the ground water in central Wisconsin right now. [Host]: Computer data from these animals can then be used to narrow down the focus of Porter's research, saving both time and the

lives of animals. Rather than simply go out and measure everything under the sun and hope you're going to get something that's useful, if you have a model and a set of assumptions, you're really focusing on what are the critical things that you need to know to answer your particular question. If I had to do experimentally what I can do on a computer, I have probably saved myself maybe 10 to 100,000 experiments. Hit this [key stroke] New technology may point the way towards middle ground but actual discussion between the two sides so bitterly divided usually only happens when television interviews are spliced together. Is there room for further compromise? [Lecturer]: This discussion today is going to be based on the issue of animal well-being, animal welfare, and how you determine what those are, and if [Reporter] [lecturer talking in the background] This class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is called Human Animal

Relationships, and it's designed to bring together the concerns of students and those of researchers like Tina Widowski and Charles Snowden. [Different speaker] Monkeys and lots of other animals are very sensitive to changes that occur in their environment. [Lecturer]: Well, if you're concerned with not allowing humans into the laboratories because they might upset the primate's uh, life there, look at what you do when you take from, take them from their natural habitat and bring them into the laboratory. I think that would be uh, more catastrophic. [Different speaker]: That's an interesting argument. One might argue the animals are better off um in the natural habitat, but, in fact, there's a lot of risk, a lot of danger, and a lot of um disease and a lot of death that occurs in natural environments, too. [Different speaker]: I mean, I know earlier this decade that this university primate center was targeted as a national demonstration as one of the four worst in the country by a national animal welfare group and I just want to know why. [Different speaker]: People on on each of the many, many sides of all of these issues are mostly good, caring people

who are trying to do their best. What their best is is completely a subjective opinion. [Protesters]: No more torture, no more pain, stop the pysch lab's dirty game. [Host]: But in the end what takes place in a far off university laboratory has a very personal consequence. And when something is personal it's tough to find a middle ground. [Different voice]: It's the only way for Charlotte. It's the only way. When you struggle daily to hold on to something or someone so desperately, and to have to think that it might be taken away, um, I get angry and I get active. And by golly I'm not to let anybody take that away from me, or from ?Sharon?, or from anybody else. [Male voice shouting]: Individuals with debilitating illnesses and disabilities have a special responsibility, not only to ourselves, in the quest to get well,

but also to those who still believe that crude animal experiments are necessary. [Host]: Middle ground. Tough to find when one side believes it's conducting important research and one wants to empty the cages. [Male voice] And the way to help them is not merely, say, to make sure that they have larger cleaner cages. That's to reform an injustice but to reform an injustice is to prolong an injustice. uh What you have to do is empty the cages. You have to get them out of there somehow. Part of what we need to do is to recognize that there are multiplicity of viewpoints and and um accept and tolerate the diversity that does develop, as long as the bottom line is that that all of us who have stewardship for animals, whether we be pet owners or whether we be [squeaky sound] um researchers, take clear responsibility for the well-being of those animals. [animal sounds]

[Host] And that wraps up tonight's program. We would like to hear from you if you'd like to comment on this topic, you can write us at 7 Central, Wisconsin Public Television, 821 University Avenue Madison, Wisconsin 53706. I'm Dave Iverson. Thanks for watching. Join us again a week from tonight for our next seven Central. [music] [Silence]