Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Animal Rights Activists Firebombings at UC Santa Cruz

There's been surprisingly little national coverage of the recent firebombing of two scientists' homes at University of California at Santa Cruz by (almost definitely) animal rights activists. This wasn't someone tossing an M-80 into someone's backyard. It was terrorism, period, and I'm glad to see people in the mainstream press using that word to describe it. And it's happening internationally: in the UK a few years ago, animal rights terrorist bombed the home of a venture capitalist investing in a medical research company.

I work in the biotech business and I do drug research - on humans - so maybe I know something about medical research. With respect to animal research, here are the three options:

1) Keep advancing medicine and eliminating suffering by using animals in research as humanely and sparingly as possible.

2) Keep advancing medicine by using humans as the first-line test animal. I invite animal rights activists to be the first volunteers in the clinical trials of these medicines.

3) Stop advancing medical science and go back to chanting and sprinkling colored powder on sick people.


As to the old saw that "we have computers now, so we don't need animals": animal research is incredibly expensive. Don't you think we would do away with it in a SECOND if we really could replace it with computer modeling?

Groups like the Animal Liberation Front are dangerous, and should be dealt with in exactly the same was as other terrorist organizations.

5 comments:

Compuwatcher said...

Did you ever notice the acronym for Animal Liberation Front is ALF? What was one thing that ALF always wanted? To EAT the family cat.

Ironic... Isn't it.

Aaron said...

What is this colored powder you speak of?!?! Is there enough for everyone? Can only rich people afford the special colors?

mjlijewski said...

These people really piss me off.

They should volunteer at an animal shelter if they reall want to help animals.

Kind of like those dopeheads hanging out in the trees on the Cal campus.

Instead of trying to save a handful of trees, they could have been on the frontlines with the firefighters helping to save millions.

We should encourage the ALF folks to immolate themselves.

Anonymous said...

Those who are cruel to animals are killing our planet! Take back our World! Acquire the Red Alert Newsletter.

Thomas Paine Jr. said...

Adamgv, "killing our planet"? What exactly does that mean? I'm only half being a smart-ass; I'm interested to see if there's really a meaning behind these words.

Cruelty to an animal would be creating pain for its own sake. Research in the name of eliminating suffering (for humans and other species too) is not cruelty.

Do you eschew all Western medicine because it was all tested on animals or do you find some way to justify your ibuprofen? Should we "save" horses from receiving anti-worm drugs because they were tested on other horses? These are serious questions that we should expect you to answer.