PETA Airline Protest Hurts People

The subtitle of my book, A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy, is The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement.  Case in point: Airlines are foolishly acceding to PETA’s pressure not to transport macaque monkeys, necessary for advanced medical and scientific research.  From the Nature story:

Each year, thousands of macaques and other monkeys are flown into Europe and North America to supply academic and industrial research labs — more than 18,000 to the United States in 2011 alone. But in a campaign that could affect scientists across the West, the few major air carriers that still transport non-human primates are coming under unprecedented pressure to halt the practice…

Two other airlines are also in the public spotlight. Air France faces mounting pressure as the last major European carrier to transport research primates. And Air Canada is petitioning the Canadian Transportation Agency, the body that regulates Canadian air carriers, for the required permission to refuse to transport research primates in the future. With news breaking last week that ferry companies have entirely ceased transporting all research animals — including sophisticated mouse disease models — into the United Kingdom, researchers fear that this is the start of a larger trend.

If this campaign succeeds, it will be paid in the high price of continued human suffering. From my blog entry, “National Primate Liberation Week Should Be Renamed Keep Humans Suffering Week:”

 Here is just a very short and partial list of research on monkeys, most about which I have written, that has led to–or offers great hope for–the alleviation of tremendous human suffering:

• Constrained Induced Movement Therapy, which allows people with numbed limbs from stroke to regain the use of their limbs.  It is now being tried to help children with cerebral palsy.  Yet, in the notorious and mendacious Silver Spring Monkey Case, PETA tried to ruin the life of Dr. Edward Taub, whose humanitarianism led to this breakthrough because early research was conducted on monkeys.
• Paralyzed people are learning to use robotic arms with their minds after electrodes were implanted in their brains, experiments that would not have been possible but for earlier monkey research.
• Scientists have learned that one brain cell can restore movement in paralyzed people. Only research on monkeys can determine whether the research can lead to human treatments.
• Sight might one day be restored to the blind with implants–which were first tested in monkeys.
• Monkey testing has permitted botulinim to become, just a few days ago, an FDA approved treatment for chronic migraines.
• Monkey testing showed that adult stem cells might be useful in treating Parkinson’s.
• Chimpanzee research was necessary to, and helped perfect, the hepatitis vaccine.
• Monkey research proved that a gene therapy technique was deadly. Not heeding the message led to the death of Jesse Gelsinger, who was given the therapy despite the monkey deaths.

Bottom line: If we can’t research on animals, we will not be able to develop treatments and cures.  That is the exact opposite of compassion. This is the cost not only of animal rights, but of rejecting human exceptionalism.