FLASHBACK 1989: Lynn Bradak explores the abuses of animal testing so decried by Utah activists. | City Weekly REWIND | Salt Lake City Weekly
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FLASHBACK 1989: Lynn Bradak explores the abuses of animal testing so decried by Utah activists.

Sad Eyes ... Silenced Eyes

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In commemoration of City Weekly's 40th anniversary, we are digging into our archives to celebrate. Each week, we FLASHBACK to a story or column from our past in honor of four decades of local alt-journalism. Whether the names and issues are familiar or new, we are grateful to have this unique newspaper to contain them all.

Title: Sad Eyes ... Silenced Eyes
Author: Lynn Bradak
Date: Nov. 17, 1989

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Everyone recoils from the horror of intentional or ignorant animal abuse. Our stomachs turn when we read of the Davis County woman who “punished” her ex-husband by leaving his dogs penned to die of thirst and starvation.

We cringe that someone would hang a dog over a Salt Lake City school wall. We ache for the schoolchildren who had to see the splattered blood from its frenzied pawing. We wonder that a father and son could think it “funny” to tape firecrackers in cats’ mouths for the fourth of July.

“Animal abuse shatters the humane structure of a community,” says Sheri Martinez, Director of Wasatch Humane. “The lack of compassion or empathy that allows cruelty towards the weak and helpless should terrify us all.”

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But there is more, much more, to the Animal Rights Movement. It wants to open our eyes to other atrocities, the everyday atrocities, that they say are too easy to ignore. Our meat-centered meals, our vanity, our quest for immortality and tendency to discard pets the way we discard old clothes, they say, implicates us all in thousands, millions of pain-filled lives and pain-filled deaths in Utah every year.

We’re a group of informed, enlightened, humane people, right? We know that putting oven cleaner or hair salon solutions in rabbit eyes is, at best, a cover-your-ass tradition for some companies; we know that the rabbits’ agony doesn’t tell us anything a little common sense wouldn’t tell us anyway.

We know that psychological tests involving animals have no application to humans; we know that psychological development is species-specific (if you deprive rats of food you’ll only find out how a stressed-out lab rat reacts to food deprivation). We know that force-feeding drugs to monkeys is a poor substitute for dragging the white coats out of the labs to observe the process of human drug addiction at a drug treatment center. If we look up a drug in the Physicians’ Desk Reference (Sinequan: the mechanism of action is not known, Reproduction studies have been performed in rats rabbits, monkeys and dogs...the relevance for humans is not known), we might wonder why all those rats, rabbits, monkeys, and dogs were impregnated, force-fed the drug, and killed.

Our kinder, gentler society knows that these sorts of tests are unnecessary, rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Think again.

Your tax dollars at work. After some very expensive animal testing done on Agent Orange, the poor veterans are still left hanging because “dioxin’s effects on human beings are far from clear. There is no straightforward way to extrapolate toxicology measures from animals to humans or even from one animal to another. The researchers’ estimates of dioxin’s cancer-causing power differ by a factor of at least 1000.” (Discover Magazine, April 1989)

The armed forces that brought us $640 toilet seats has gone over the $2 million mark to shoot cats in the head. They’ve found that, after being shot, “the animal often stops breathing.”

Okay. We enlightened folk know all about that sort of thing.

Hundreds of pets are seized from Utah Animal Control agencies by the University of Utah, Utah Biomedical Test Labs (one of Jim Sorenson’s babies), the Veterans Administration, and BYU under an antiquated law. The University of Utah averages over 400 dead animals every working day. Add the others and that number easily reaches 1000. Rats, mice, primates, dogs, cats, pigs. Cows walk their lives away on treadmills at the Beck Street facility, tubes erupting from their sides, connected to the artificial heart machines that provide contrapuntal rhythm to their hooves.

Weber State had concurrent studies on how to introduce members of their coyote colony to the wild, and how to kill coyotes in the wild.

A lot of people are making a lot of money. No disease has ever been cured.

The University of Utah even sent their security people to photograph license plates at a meeting of the Citizens Against Mandatory Pound Seizure (now Citizens Animal Management and Protection Society). How did it feel to be spied on? Pat Von Khrum, a founder of the group, says it makes her suspicious. “What prompts that kind of harassment of a citizens group? What are they trying to hide?”

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And now, the ultimate heresy, physicians and researchers themselves decry the use of animals in research not only because some of them find it ethically repugnant, but many “insiders” think it is counterproductive to the progress of medicine. The Medical Research Modernization Committee and the Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine are the most prominent nationally. They say that misleading animal testing can be devastating to human health. Roy Kupsinel, MD, says he is opposed to vivisection because it’s bad science. Dr. Jack Taylor, a veterinarian charged with preventing the spread of disease among animals at the University of Utah’s Vivarium, says that “many of the animal rights people don’t really know the impact that halting the use of animals would have on human health.”

Actually, maybe they do. They know how deeply it would cut into doctor, drug, and vivisector profits. Sheri Martinez, Director of Wasatch Humane, says that biomedical research is an industry, a multi-billion dollar industry. “To say that they are in business because they want us to be healthy is like saying General Motors incorporated to promote highway safety.”

The logo of a relatively new anti-vivisection group, SUPPRESS, shows both a child and a dog trapped in a laboratory vial, captioned ANIMAL RESEARCH IS SCIENTIFIC FRAUD—WE ARE ALL VICTIMS.

George Bernard Shaw saw opposition to vivisection as both a human rights and an animal rights issue many years ago: “It is hardly to be expected that a man who does not hesitate to vivisect for the sake of science will hesitate to lie to protect it from what he deems the ignorant ‘sentimentality of the laity.’”

You can always drop in to the University of Utah Vivarium and look for some straight answers. You’re paying for it, after all.


Factory Farms

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...the rooster crows as the sun rises over the barnyard, a few cows graze peacefully in the meadow while hens scratch for more grain, fluffy chicks scurrying at their feet...

An idyllic scene, but a scene from the past according to Robin Hall. She was an organizer of last August’s Veal Boycott outside Le Fleur de Lys restaurant in Salt Lake City and is a founder of Wasatch Vegetarians. “In today’s factory farms, piglets are put in confinement cages as soon as they’re weaned so the mother can be artificially inseminated as often as possible. Male chicks are destroyed right after hatching, usually suffocating in bags, while the female chicks have their beaks removed so they can’t harm each other in their close quarters. Each has a space about the size of a shoebox for its entire laying life. Most milk cows never leave the milking parlor until they are butchered.”

Ms. Hall says that the Veal Boycott was directed at the consumer. “As with any market, it’s a matter of supply and demand. We didn’t ask people to not eat at the restaurant, just to not order milk fed veal.” Reaction? “Many people were appalled when they read the information and were very supportive of our efforts.”

Veal has been targeted because veal calves are fed an iron-deficient formula to encourage weight gain and crated to restrict their movement and muscle development. Animal Rights groups see it as a particularly ugly part of an overall ugly industry.

A representative of Veal Natural in Salt Lake City says the demand for veal is down, especially in California where the groups have been most active. Overall, the market in the Intermountain West has been pretty stable, however.

Animal Rights groups have found allies in environmentalists who point out that intensive farming practices produce 250,000 pounds of excrement a second and that sewage systems on feedlots are nonexistent. It takes about 2500 gallons of water to produce a pound of meat, 25 gallons for a pound of wheat. Some maintain that we will all be vegetarians eventually; not because of animal suffering but because we will have to in order to survive as the planet’s resources are depleted.

In 1988, 474,800 cattle, 23,400 sheep and lambs, 261,500 pigs and nearly 4 million turkeys were commercially slaughtered in Utah. At any given time there are about two million commercial egg laying hens confined in the state.