While I was catching up on some of the stuff that's happened while I was away, I noticed PZ Myer's article about animal rights terrorists who intimidated a neurobiologist at UCLA named Dario Ringach to the point where he decided to stop doing research on primates. Then I saw that Jake and Bora also weighed in on the issue (although for the life of me I can't figure out how on earth Bora came to the conclusion that animal rights is a conservative philosophy at its core--his explanation is tortured, at best). Here's what happened, as reported in Inside Higher Ed:
Ringach's name and home phone number are posted on the Primate Freedom Project's Web site, and colleagues and UCLA officials said that Ringach was harassed by phone -- his office phone number is no longer active -- and e-mail, as well as through demonstrations in front of his home.
[...]
Colleagues suggested that Ringach, who did not return e-mails seeking comment, was spooked by an attack on a colleague. In June, the Animal Liberation Front took credit for trying to put a Molotov cocktail on the doorstep of Lynn Fairbanks, another UCLA researcher who does experimentation on animals. The explosive was accidentally placed on the doorstep of Fairbanks's elderly neighbor's house, and did not detonate.
So, basically, what we had was a campaign of intimidation that culminated in a brutal, thuggish, and incompetent attack that was misdirected at an innocent third party, and quite reasonably Ringach was afraid that he was next. Animal rights violence has been much more of a problem in Britain than the U.S., but it would appear that we Yanks are now trying to make up for the shortfall. Although I have never done animal research on anything other than mice, rats, and, in the distant past, rabbits, I still feel the chill when this sort of thing happens. The reason is that animal rights terrorists are absolutists. They fail to see the difference between animal rights and animal welfare. As Brian O'Connor, who routinely covered these issues in his old and now defunct blog Animal Crackers quoted an article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that is no longer available online:
The philosophy of animal rights says, in essence, that animals have the same rights as humans: For example, we don't keep other humans as slaves, so we shouldn't keep dogs as pets, and zoos should not confine exotic animals that are threatened with extinction. All medical testing on animals should be banned. Because we don't kill and eat human beings or use human byproducts for food, we should ban the consumption of all meat and other animal products, including milk and eggs. We don't use human hides for clothing, so we should not use leather for shoes, fur for coats or even the silk from silk worms for blouses.
Of course, we do do all sorts of medical testing on humans (they're called Phase I, II, and III clinical trials); there are simply many more limitations on what we can do in such trials, which is as it should be. Be that as it may, as Brian put it, it's far more than just the above when activists decide to put their philosophy into practice:
There are really two parts to this: there is the "we should not" part -- the prohibitions, if you will -- that characterize the passive AR lifestyle that dictates what each true believer should not do.
But there is the active, affirmative side, too -- the half of the "ideology" that dictates positions people should take on various social issues involving animals, and how those social issues should be approached. The "active" limb of AR has as it's goal nothing less than radical societal change. For some, the ideology is so clear and the call so compelling that they are moved to violence.
After all, if each life is equally valuable, then morality becomes a simple matter of arithmetic. If by killing a few you can save many, you do it. If "the few" happen to be scientists, and "the many" happen to be animals, then you openly advocate assassination. Each life -- that of an animal and that of a human -- is equally valuable.
In the AR world, almost anything is justifiable in the name of "the animals" and in pursuit of a cruelty-free world -- however cruel any given action might be to an individual human.
Exactly. If one believes that the life of every animal is 100% morally equivalent to the life of any human, then suddenly it seems morally acceptable to threaten, attack, and even kill humans in order to create a "cruelty-free" world. (I wonder if what animal rights activists would do to prevent animals from eating each other out in the wild. Being torn apart by, for instance, lions is a pretty cruel way for an antelope to die.) Based on this dubious moral equivalency, animal rights radicals argue that it is wrong to have animals as pets, wrong to eat meat, and, most relevant to me, wrong to use them in experiments. Any means of stopping this suddenly becomes acceptable--including placing explosives at the doorstep of scientists involved in animal research. And, if the bomb was off target and some uninvolved elderly couple was injured or killed as a result, well, that's just collateral damage, as one prominent animal rights activist admits (see below).
One of the most despicable people in the animal rights movement, unfortunately, happens to be a fellow surgeon by the name of Jerry Vlasak. He is an incendiary apologist for animal rights violence, and, not surprisingly, he came out of the woodwork to justify this attack:
Jerry Vlasak, a practicing physician, a spokesman for the Animal Liberation Press Office, and a former animal researcher, said that "obviously the roughly 30 non-human primates [Ringach] was killing every year would be ecstatic" with his decision to halt his work. Vlasak said that when he was an animal researcher, he published papers on his work, but didn't feel that he contributed anything important to society.
I rather suspect that Vlasak might be right about his not contributing anything important to society with his research, but more likely it was not because it was animal research but rather because of the poor quality of the research, given his poor reasoning otherwise. Even so, it's emblematic of how animal rights activists personalize their own experiences, rather than base their position on reason. Just because he felt that his animal experiments weren't worthwhile and perhaps caused undue suffering, he thinks that all animal research should be banned.
Vlasak goes on:
As to the Molotov cocktail, Vlasak said that "force is a poor second choice, but if that's the only thing that will work ... there's certainly moral justification for that."
This is typical of Vlasak, but actually less radical than some of his previous statements. This is where Brian O'Connor's old blog comes in handy, as he has catalogued them. I'll pick out a choice few:
Vlasak, appearing on an Australian TV show:
Would I advocate taking five guilty vivisector's lives to save hundreds of millions of innocent animal lives? Yes, I would.
Vlasak in an interview in The Observer 2004:
To the fury of groups working with animals, Jerry Vlasak, a trauma surgeon and prominent figure in the anti-vivisection movement, told The Observer: 'I think violence is part of the struggle against oppression. If something bad happens to these people [animal researchers], it will discourage others. It is inevitable that violence will be used in the struggle and that it will be effective.'
Brian O'Connor has helpfully included a list of other classic Vlasak quotes:
"You can justify, from a political standpoint, any type of violence you want to use." -- "Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t!" (Showtime cable network) 4/1/04
"I think that violence and nonviolence are not moral principles, they're tactics." -- "Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t!" (Showtime cable network) 4/1/04
"If someone is killing, on a regular basis, thousands of animals, and if that person can only be stopped in one way by the use of violence, then it is certainly a morally justifiable solution." -- "Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t!" (Showtime cable network) 4/1/04
"I think we do need to embrace direct action and violent tactics as part of our movement ... I don't think we ought to be criticizing someone, whether we're criticizing [them] because they're writing letters, or whether we criticize them because they're burning down fur stores or vivisection labs. I think we need to include everybody in that circle." -- Animal Rights 2002 convention 6/27/02
"[The police] are protecting the circus, they are protecting the meat and dairy industry, they are protecting the vivisection industry and I equate them in my own mind on a moral and ethical level with the -- no different than say guards in a Nazi concentration camp." -- at a panel called "Coping with Law Enforcement" at the Animal Rights 2003 LA convention 8/2/03
"I don't have any doubt in my mind that there will come a time when we will see violence against animal rights abusers." -- "Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t!" (Showtime cable network) 4/1/04
And a transcript of an audiotape of Vlasak recorded in one of his unguarded moments:
I think there is a use for violence in our movement. And I think it can be an effective strategy. Not only is it morally acceptable, I think that there are places where it could be used quite effectively from a pragmatic standpoint.
For instance, if vivisectors were routinely being killed, I think it would give other vivisectors pause in what they were doing in their work -- and if these vivisectors were being targeted for assassination, and call it political assassination or what have you, I think if -- and I wouldn't pick some guy way down the totem pole, but if there were prominent vivisectors being assassinated, I think that there would be a trickle-down effect and many, many people who are lower on that totem pole would say, 'I'm not going to get into this business because it's a very dangerous business and there's other things I can do with my life that don't involve getting into a dangerous business.' And I think that the -- strictly from a fear and intimidation factor, that would be an effective tactic.
And I don't think you'd have to kill -- assassinate -- too many vivisectors before you would see a marked decrease in the amount of vivisection going on. And I think for 5 lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, 2 million, 10 million non-human animals.
And I -- you know -- people get all excited about, 'Oh what's going to happen when -- the ALF accidentally kills soomebody in an arson?' Well, I mean -- I think we need to get used to this idea. It's going to happen, okay? It's going to happen.
This is the mentality that we are dealing with. Listen to the whole interview here. I encourage you to listen to the whole thing. Note Dr. Vlasak's dim view of humans in which he claims that 85% of people will never change unless they are made to fear.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating that there should be no rules or laws to protect animals, but it's ridiculous to claim that the life of a mouse is the equivalent to the life of a human. I do my utmost to prevent unnecessary suffering in the mice I occasionally have to use to study cancer. In fact, applications for each new animal protocol to the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee has, just in the seven years that I've been an independent researcher, have become more and more onerous at my institution in response to federal rules that are designed to minimize the use of animals and minimize suffering of said animals. Because I don't like killing mice and because it's getting more expensive and bureaucratically onerous to use them, I'd abandon animal research in an instant if there were any another way to study the problems that I'm studying and get answers that might benefit human patients.
But there isn't; so I don't, which is why one of my retorts to animal rights radicals who are against all use of animals in research is to ask them whether they would volunteer to be the first to try a new drug that has never been tested other than in cell culture and computer models (or if they would volunteer their children to do so). If they refuse, then I ask them how they would decide what human would be the first to try the new drug. Animal models may be imperfect in predicting efficacy and side effects of new drugs, but they're far better than any other models we have.The bottom line is that, yes, animals were poorly treated in research settings in the past, but now there exists a framework of laws and rules that do a pretty good job of minimizing the use of animals and minimizing any suffering of animals that are used for research, and all facilities doing animal research are regularly inspected by the United States Department of Agriculture and the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care, as well as various state agencies. All applications for federal grants to support any form of animal research require me to provide evidence that our animal facility is certified by the above entities.
In any case, protecting research animals and minimizing their suffering is animal welfare, not animal rights. (See here for a good rule of thumb to distinguish the two. Basically, if someone believes that animals have rights equal to that of humans and that if you can't do it to a human you shouldn't be allowed to do it to an animal, that's an animal rights belief, not animal welfare.) And, in reality, It's a lie when animal rights advocates claim that animal research isn't needed, that we can get the same information from computer or cell culture models. In cancer, that's a total crock. I'll give you just one example. Without animal models, we might never have discovered the importance of tumor angiogenesis in contributing to the growth of tumors, because angiogenesis requires the three dimensional interaction between tumor cells, surrounding stromal cells, and vascular cells that ultimately form the new blood vessels. Without animal research, we would never have the benefits of insulin, transplantation surgery, cardiac surgery, chemotherapy, and many other medical treatments that we now take for granted.
Sadly, though, as PZ puts it, terrorism does work, and, if animal rights terrorists aren't put in the same category as al Qaeda or any other type of terrorists for purposes of law enforcement at both the federal, state, and local level, I fear that they may succeed in impeding biomedical research to the point where the U.S. becomes like Britain, with researchers whose work involves animal experimentation moving to countries they can do their research without worrying about Molotov cocktails being thrown at their houses.
"If one believes that the life of every animal is 100% morally equivalent to the life of any human", then if one believes it's morally acceptable to kill a few humans to save a lot of animals, one must also believe that it's morally acceptable to kill a few animals to save a lot of humans, isn't it ?
At that level, really. he's placing an equally low value on all life, if he's will to trade. If you are willing to systematically kill in this nature, you can't much place much value on any life, and if he doesn't much value animal life in the way this intimates, then he must be doing it for other reasons.
A personal feeling of significance perhaps?
If all life is 100% morally equivalent, why isn't Vlasak protesting outside of Drosophila and C. elegans labs? There are orders of magnitude more flies and nematodes being killed every day than there are rodents or primates.
That's easy. Drosophila and nemotodes aren't cute and cuddly like lab mice, lab rats (which, contrary to the rats one finds in sewers, etc., are actually rather cute), rabbits, dogs, and primates.
That's the other reason I could never get behind animal right types. They claim to be driven by moral principles, but they're so damned inconsistent. Some animals are more equal than others, I guess.
I have always wondered how many of the anti-animal experiment crowd would accept a catastrophic failure of a treatment that was not allowed to be tested first in animals. Surely there are a lot of failures on the way to trying any procedure in human research. What human wants to be the first organism to undergo an experiment.
Granted, there are people with medical problems who need "makeup." Are the other users willing to forgo makeup; or accept the risk to save a few animals for this frivolous, vain practice? They may say they will take the chance; but, injury can change one's mind in a hurry.
Penn & Teller had an installation on "BullS**t" about this. A high-ranking member of PETA has type 1 (aka, juvenile) diabetes. She considers that experiments with dogs, to furnish a treatment, were justified to save her life.
For the record, thirty years ago I worked with animals in a toxicology lab, and I feel animals should be treated with consideration.
From a purely philisophical position, the only animals that deserve rights are those that can respect the rights of others. Among humans, such rights are protected by laws, and infringing on rights of others leads to a loss of rights for self. Non-human animals do not respect rights, and therefore, deserve none. But humane treatment and respect for animal welfare are a sign of our civilization (and in some cases, our beurocracy).
One of the biggest loopholes in the animal rights world is veternary medicine. Without animal testing, veternary medicine would not exist. I would be surprised to find any animal rightist willing to dismiss veternary medicine.
I do take issue with the use of vivisectionist. The use of such an outdated term reminds me of a creationist attempting to criticize a "Darwinist."
For what it's worth, the conclusion that one can kill humans to preserve a greater number of animals only follows if you also accept a version of the principle of utility (or some other consequentialist equivalent). That is, you have to accept that you can simply count up the number of lives on either side of the moral equation in order to figure out what to do. If that's true, then if x humans have to die to protect y animals, as long as x is less than y, that will morally justify an action.
However, there's no good reason to take this principle on board. Any deontologist worth his salt would find this simply inane (as I do): if all life is valuable, including animal life, then killing to preserve animal life is as wrong as the taking of the animal's life in the first place. Doing wrong to prevent wrong is not morally permissible. (A similar argument could be run from virtue theories, too, I think.) At best, killing humans to protect animal life is a horrible necessity -- doing wrong to prevent even greater wrong.
I should note that not all consequentialists who believe in animal rights have to advocate an eye for an eye (or, strictly, less eyes for more eyes). Peter Singer, AFAIK, does not. The point I'm making (or trying to make!) is that the moral error leading to justification of violence doesn't lie in saying animals have rights. The error lies in thinking that one can justify taking life because lives can be simply and easily aggregated. You can't aggregate lives like that.
"From a purely philisophical position, the only animals that deserve rights are those that can respect the rights of others. Among humans, such rights are protected by laws, and infringing on rights of others leads to a loss of rights for self. Non-human animals do not respect rights, and therefore, deserve none."
This argument requires that young humans deserve no rights, and transparently fails if you hold that babies deserve a right against torture, for instance. If you do hold so, perhaps you should look for another argument. In the meantime, maybe read some Peter Singer.
I'm dismayed "animal rights types" are painted with such broad brushes by some - imo, consistent application of a right against harm (and accompanying harm assessment standards) are a hallmark of (the reasonable side of) the animal rights movement. Those attempting to restrict rights to humans are the ones stuck with either inconsistency or arbitrariness (speciesism).
In no way do I support the terrorism discussed here, but as ADHR notes, that phenomenon is not implicit in the ascription of rights to non-humans.
I do not believe that *all* people who favor animal rights believe animals deserve *equal* rights to humans. There is a far difference between "meat animals have a right to be raised in good conditions and slaughtered as painlessly as possible" and saying "humans must never kill animals". There's also a difference between believing in a right to life for animals and a right to freedom-- one friend I have who absolutely hates the idea of euthanasia for sick pets has over 30 indoor cats. She believes they have a right to comfort, not roam around to starve and get hit by cars.
Calling it animal welfare instead of animal rights is one way to separate out the extremists, but that distinction was not being used when I became interested in the issues 20 years ago. It seems to me the nut-jobs are being allowed to define the issues.
Just for instance, my vegan brother has never opposed medical research on animals; sane people who value animal life value human life, too. On the other hand, I would never buy a hygiene product for him that wasn't labeled cruelty-free (and I look for the label myself). I would, however, condemn anyone who committed violence against a "Mary-Kay Commando" (in quote marks because after the Bloom County denunciation, Mary Kay stopped animal testing and therefore are no longer a company that needs to be shamed, but nonetheless, the name is memorable)
This post rather reminds me of people who take the rantings of Muslim extremists and say that Islam can't possibly be a religion of peace.
Peter Singer has advocated euthansia for infants with disabilities. His position is that newborns are not automatically deserving of human rights.
I have seen the animal use committee where I worked cancel an experiment because it was not humane. The vet proposed an alternative that was acceptable. I am in favor of decent treatment of animals. There are extremists that will accept no use of animals, even when the animals benefit, such as pets.
Samantha, the distinction you makeis the distinction between Animal Welfare and Animal Rights - two diametrically opposed philosophies.
As often happens, the unfortunate use of "liberal" and "conservative" (but there ARE no better terms) is read through the glasses of here-and-now. I use them in purely psyhological sense with no reference to any particular policy stances of any particular political party in any particular country at any particular time in history - but I understand that it is hard to clear one's mind of contingent baggage.
"Conservative" is meant to mean: hierarchical, concerned more with identities (and relative power) of players than the rules of the game, dependent on moral order, with external locus of moral authority.
"Liberal" is meant to mean: interactionist, concerned more with rules of interactions between players than with the identities of players, with internal locus of moral authority.
In those terms, Animal Welfare is "liberal" while Animal Rights is "conservative".
I am a little surprised that nobody here has drawn a comparison between this situation and embryonic stem cells.
Both involve groups taking the notion of moral equivalence to an illogical extreme. Is an 8-cell embryo equal to an animal equal to a postnatal human being? Does it matter whether the embryo will be destroyed later, or whether the animals are cute and cuddly, or whether the eventual results of such research might save the lives of millions of postnatal human beings?
In the end, what strikes me the most about both positions ("animal rights" and "embryo rights")is the complete and utter intellectual laziness involved. There is no coherent philosophical ideation beyond: "this bothers me on an emotional level, so I will do anything to stop it with no further thought or consideration given to the complex moral questions involved."
Vincent wrote
Young humans do not have the same rights as adults. Full rights come with maturity, and an ability to respect the rights of others. There are laws against their abuse, and human rights apply based on their being human. I don't think anyone advocates torturing babies or animals... If I am right this goes back to Plato, and has stood the test of time.
Not sure why you invoke the "same rights as adults" when I mentioned or implied no such thing. Otoh, you implied that any right must stem from the ability to respect it, so my extrapolation holds. "based on being human" is speciesism, pure and simple, with no apparent reasoning behind it. If you have some ethical rationale to treat a specific genome differently, let's hear it.
If it's not completely obvious by now what is needed in the USA, and especially at UCLA, is a grassroots pro-animal research movement similar to Pro-Test in Oxford (see Nick Anthis report at http://scienceblogs.com/scientificactivist/2006/07/diversity_of_perspec…). While organizations such as Americans for Medical Progress do a good job of making the facts about medical research available to the public, countering the claims of anti-vivisectionists in the press and lobbying politicians, they have not never as far as I'm aware taken the issue to the streets.
There are laws currently under discussion, the animal enterprise terrorism act in particular, that many scientists hope will allow law enforcement officials to tackle the extremists. I don't believe that the law by itself will ever solve the problem, at best it will grant science a temperory respite. I also believe that in a climate (on both sides of the atlantic) of increasing paranoia about terrorism we should be cautious about relying too much on laws and organizations which may end up restricting the hard won freedoms that we enjoy today.
It is vital that the supporters of science are willing to make a public stand against intimidation by antivivisectionist extremists. UCLA, with it's large research community and long history of student activism strikes me as the perfect place to make that stand. So does anyone in UCLA feel like doing for the USA what Oxford University did for the UK?
There are some very interesting comments above. Perhaps the one that struck me the most was the comment that those willing to trade a few humans for a million animals seem incapable of making the reverse trade.
I know quite well that there are sane animal rights proponents. Consider the late, lamented Steve Irwin, who often spoke against any use of animal products taken from animals found in the wild -- even if the actual products came from a farm (such as a crocodile farm), because it dillutes efforts to curtail the trade in endangered species. They would tend to fit in the "animal welfare" category as used by Orac above. (The phrase "animal rights" has been so abused it's now difficult to pin down a good consensus definition. Different factions have their own definitions, and the ones we're talking about here not only have the most extreme definitions but are the least willing to admit the fact.) But there are those who are not at all sane. They are akin to militant fundamentalists. It is all about a single issue, about which all their judgements of right and wrong revolve.
I have come to the conclusion that most of these people are either failing to fully think through their positions (hence why they lack pity for fruitflies or roundworms) or are actually misanthropes. Possibly both. After all, the only way to truly stop human harm of animals is to remove humans. We cannot help but compete with animals for resources, no matter how nice we try to be about it, and the most extreme of the extremists object even to this. (Burning down subdivisions under construction, for instance.)
Random thought: I once read an organic farmer mentioning how "bloodless food" is a myth. Lots of vegans choose their diet because they do not wish to harm animals. But only the smartest of them are aware of what this farmer is aware of: animals die, sometimes in great agony, because of the cultivation of organic produce (and any other produce, for that matter). He talked about how frequently his tiller slaughters field mice, echoing a famous poem by Robert Burns about a similar incident.
I think some of these people have to be either deluded or misanthropic. It's hard to make sense of it otherwise. I think more are deluded than misanthropic, though. Here in Minnesota, we had a group of them release a colony of lab rats from the University of Minnesota. The sad thing is that the rats had been raised in captivity and thus would not have known how to forage in the wild. Many also had genetic defects, either for study or because of inbreeding. There were a lot of albinos among them, and some carried infectious diseases which could've transferred to the wild population. In other words, the animal "rights" activists did them no favors whatsoever by "rescuing" them.
It really is silly to conflate the actions of extremists with the merits of animal rights arguments. Intelligent animal rights supporters of course know that it's impossible to live with inducing suffering (the operative ethical criterion). The issue isn't whether or not actions induce suffering, but how much suffering is induced. The ethical position then is to reduce as much suffering as possible while still obeying the imperative to live. They also recognize that a lot of suffering is worse than a little, so living in a way that induces less suffering is preferable to ways that produce more.
oops, typo: I wrote "of course know that it's impossible to live with inducing suffering" when I meant "...without inducing suffering"
I represented myself in a lawsuit against UCLA after a demonstration there. On August 4, 2006, I took the deposition of their medical expert. Just before I started with my questions I told UCLA's lawyer that I finally have a lawyer (who later changed his mind about taking my case).
August 4, 2006, was the SAME DAY Dario Ringach QUIT.
Do you really think that was a coincidence?
I entered the UCLA faculty building at a demonstration to ask UCLA vivisectors why they won't debate animal experimentation. The door was opened for me and I was injured but I still want to know, why won't UCLA debate what they claim is helping human beings? They have not debated vivisection in 20 years, vivisection is funded with our tax money.
Corinne Titus vs The Regents of Univeristy of California
October 31, 2006
I took the deposition of their medical witness on... August 4, 2006.
Dario Ringach quit and made his announcement on..... August 4,2006.
Coincidence? You be the judge.
Dario Ringach quits and announces "You Win" on August 4, 2006.
Corinne Titus tells UCLA that she FINALLY has a lawyer(he changed mind later)after almost 3 years of representing herself on August 4, 2006.
I told them seconds before the deposition I took of UCLA's medical expert.
This move was also tied into the Animal Enterprise Terrorist Act.
I do not belong to any animal rights group and know that vivisection is both an animal rights issue and a human rights issue. We are different species which produces misleading, dangerous results and is a halt to medical progress. Tax paying human beings deserve to hear a debate, we pay for your "research".
Overall, the jury was biased and said vivisection is a necessary evil. However, they said they do care where their tax money goes and are not opposed to anyone debating vivisection. I told the jury I want to see UCLA debate someday before I die.
I am a non violent activist with a dream. I live for exposing the truth. This country was founded on debating.
I have a dream.
If any UCLA vivisectors are willing to debate animal experimentation please contact me at CoryCatLady@aol.com
I have a MD in mind, not someone you pick, thank-you.
Come on now, stand up and debate.
Secrecy is the enemy of democracy. If "animal experimentors" are acting honorably, they can do it with the doors open and the lights on.
(A quote by Bob Edwards but I changed the word politicians to animal experimentors)
Let's put a debate together. After all, it's been 20 years, hello? Can anyone hear me?
The door to the UCLA Faculty Center was opened up fo me on December 16, 2003, but the door to communication is locked unless we the people open it for ALL tax paying Americans.
(The crowd roars, smiling faces... peace out)
Animal experimentors are far more afraid of debating what that claim is helping humans than any threats. What does that tell you about their "work"?