People who are against animal testing

Great Debates
21

Let me add something too, if any of you hit the March of Crimes website.

We do not do any testing ourselves. We basically fund researchers to do so.

Back in 1983 or so we had a nasty little incident that made the national press. One of our researchers sewed a kitten’s eyes shut to do some blindness tests.

Let me say that this was a horrible, horrible thing and in no way condoned by the March of Dimes. The researcher did it without our knowledge. Back then from what I can gather we didn’t have such stringent rules in our grants about what constituted cruelty.

Anyway, we learned a great deal from this researcher all the same. We learned how sight works in newborn children. Now, there are those at PETA who wish that we don’t use this knowledge. My logic is, it’a bad enough that it’s already been done. Must we make the kitten’s suffering completely useless?

Anyway, whenever PETA trashes us, they always resort to this… “Twenty years ago you sewed a kitten’s eyes shut!” We explain gently that it wasn’t us, it was a researcher, his grant money was revoked, we changed our guidelines, things have changed, and animal research unfortunately is necessary so every baby will be born healthy. Then they say, “BUT YOU SEWED A KITTEN’S EYES SHUT!” And that’s usually the end of the conversation.

Thanks for listening while I made my little speech.

22

I can’t help thinking that a lot of the public objections would simply not arise (or would not be so strongly-voiced) if it wasn’t cute, fluffy, baby animals that tended to be the prime targets for animal experimentation; I mean, if you said “Look, we urgently need to do some experiments that involve sticking pins into the eyes of kittens”, many people would find this objectionable, but if you said “Look, we urgently need to do some experiments that involve sticking pins into the eyes of Deep Sea Lizard fishes”, I cannot help thinking the objection would not be quite so enthusiastic.

23

Any white mouse experimented upon will develop cancer. I think it is the stress.
Control yourselves .It is a joke.