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Protesting Animal Testing, Intruders Vandalize Italian Lab
ananyo writes "Activists occupied an animal facility at the University of Milan, Italy, at the weekend, releasing mice and rabbits and mixing up cage labels to confuse experimental protocols. Researchers at the university say that it will take years to recover their work. Many of the animals at the facility are genetic models for psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. Some of the mice removed by activists were delicate mutants and immunosuppressed 'nude' mice, which die very quickly outside controlled environments. No arrests have been made following the 12-hour drama, which took place on Saturday, although the university says that it will press charges against the protesters. The attack was staged by the animal-rights group that calls itself Fermare Green Hill (or Stop Green Hill), in reference to the Green Hill dog-breeding facility near Brescia, Italy, which it targets for closure."
Haven't we learned anything from the movies... this is how the zombie apocalypse begins
Those guys are total fucking assholes.
Hmm... perhaps among the charges should be animal cruelty for exposing the immunosuppressed animals to pathogens that will likely kill them in rather painful manners.
> "...releasing mice and rabbits and mixing up cage labels to confuse experimental protocols. Researchers at the university say that it will take years to recover their work."
But the animals are safe! That's what really matters! They can live happy lives in the wild, like they should.
> "Some of the mice they removed were delicate mutants and immunosuppressed ‘nude’ mice, which die very quickly outside controlled environments." ...oh. Oops?
I feel like it's 1987
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
People who wants the cake and eat it too..
Those activists should have to go around to patients with those disorders and tell them why they won't get any treatment.
I have some sympathy for those who think animal testing is inhumane, but really all they are doing is just making sure these animals suffered for nothing. Does anyone think these funded projects will not get funding and a new set of animals to test on again?
I think humane treatment of animals needs to be done in a context of changing society's views on animal testing itself instead of what is basically vandalism. Vandalism is only going to let people regard those against animal testing as some sort of anarchist losers.
And yes, breaking into some of these labs is a biohazard situation. Probably not zombies, but still potentially very dangerous,
It seems to me these activists have just volunteered to replace the animals in the next round of experiments.
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/fermaregreenhill/
No arrests have been made following the 12-hour drama
What? "Protesters" are in a university facility for 12 hours doing who-knows-what, come out, and just being allowed to leave? Any Italians around here that can explain why they weren't loaded on a number of vans, taken downtown, and locked up?
I wonder if that university has access to JSTOR...
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
This is the same behavior I would expect from any kind of extremist where their actions are based on intolerant idealism. Whatever your religion, if you think other people need to suffer, you are wrong.
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This is called trespassing, not occupying. It's always interested me how our politics can influence our descriptions.
"Haven't we learned anything from the movies... this is how the zombie apocalypse begins"
Nope, still not funny. Will check back in 28 weeks.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Yes, always. The only question will be which animal? Mice, monkeys, rabbits, dogs, or my lovely young granddaughter? Guess which one I vote for.
And WTF do they have against Italian labs as opposed to other Labrador Retrievers?
Bigoted assholes!
Give them drug resistsant bacteria and tell them that drug cannot be developed because we cannot test it on live mice.
It's always apocalyptic for the animals when this kind of thing happens. This is Eco-terrorism and it's the local wildlife that suffers with the large influx of new animals that they suddenly have to compete with or risk catching whatever it was that required laboratory conditions to begin with.
The lab raised animals have no natural ability to forage, hunt, seek shelter, hide from predators or anything else. They are proverbial sitting ducks and when released into the wild are usually located by the large numbers of dead (whatever) bodies all in a given area. In the event of predatory animals they can go on a rampage against farm animals or pets and the net result is a lot of other dead animals as well.
The impact to the environment is bad as there is no balance and concerns like population disbursement across suitable environments are never taken into consideration. These are not the actions of anyone that gives a damn about the environment because if they did and had a clue they would never do something like this.
When the animals are found they have to be put down (killed) in order to avoid further contaminating the environment with what was otherwise a controlled test requiring laboratory conditions. The net result is that critical research in things like medicine or other science sometimes gets set back by years as they have to start the entire research experiment over. This of course results in far more animals going through than otherwise would have and can significantly hamper life saving research.
I don't think there is anything more vapid than an animal rights activist IMHO because these people see nothing more important to focus their time on. To wake up in the morning and be outraged because rats are being used to test cancer drugs on suggests a certain disconnect from reality.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
So then maybe we should start testing on the protestors instead of the mice/etc.
Or perhaps they'd prefer stuff to hit the markets w/o any type of testing at all?
A group causing destruction and loss of life (the inevitable death of most of the released animals, in this case) to support their own radical cause - this is no different than any other terrorist attack. Italy is a democracy - if you don't like the laws that regulate animal research, work through the political and legal systems of your country to change it!
evil being done in the name of good! Self righteous bastards.
since animals do not have a mind, they do not have any rights.
*runs*
It should be noted that animal rights extremism is one of those nastiest "-ism"s out there. They're uniformly odd (gay, vegan, left-wing, what not) not-very-bright, hyper-emotional, irrational and violent, not to mention, annoying. In otherwise, extremism and violence-prone personalities.
Furthermore, southern Europe has the craziest and most violent animal rights nutters out there. For a while, I'd see a crazy woman in a chicken suit squawking through a microphone incoherently in front of my office (AstraZeneca are allegedly near by), but then I went south a few times, and those extremists are split from the whole fucking program.
Widely publicize that your lab is testing one mouse for exotic and deadly diseases. Then label all the cages only with numbers. Anyone breaking in wouldn't know which was safe to let escape. Notice that no actual disease test needed. Kind of like those signs "Property guarded by armed owner four nights per week: you guess the nights"
I like animals, I really do, but since our government agencies won't allow human volunteers prior to other means of testing, Research facilities are in a No Win situation. They use animals of various kinds to perform tests upon so the world has modern medicine that saves human lives. So they will tend to use those type of animals that the world has an abundance of, mice rats and more. The researchers also use those animals that are most closely related to human for more specific testing. Researchers must have strong constitutions, for I would suspect that many like animals and do their best to not let their personal views on animal testing influence the stringent research they are doing.
Do these protesters really believe that through animal testing they have learned how to save other animals, not just people?
Do these protesters realize that without this type of research, that they may force a delay in modern medicine by years, some of this medicine will likely be used to save themselves or someone they love dearly?
Do these protesters ever go after the insecticide companies or companies that make poison strictly for killing animals that are pests?
Do these same protester protect every species, such as roaches, ants, and stinging bugs?
If they have ever owned one pet or put an animal to sleep because they care or ever gotten a pet for their child who "wanted one" or though that a cute pet would make someone happy, then the hypocrisy is just laughable.
If you want to protest testing against animals petition your government to allow humans to volunteer for being the research test subjects, and when none come forward (after a set amount of time) then researchers can use animals. Talk to your politicians, change the laws.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
I am curious as to how they gained access to the lab. As The Archon posted ("...without running into the level of security to be found in the average factory or office complex"), given that these types of labs pretty much have big bullseyes on them, I have to wonder how rigorous were their security procedues. If you know you are a potetial target, you better have your site security ducks all in a row.
Hah.... Problem is, for the nuts that do this it doesn't matter if the animals live or die. Either they're "saved from a worse fate" in the lab, or it's "the scientists who made them like this" so their existence is already unnatural or they're even "martyrs to the cause", but it's a flimsy justification for wanting to bust up someone's workplace without running into the level of security to be found in the average factory or office complex.
Ultimately, it's not that they like animals. It's that they hate people.
And I'm not exagerating, last year, in a spanish 'animal lovers' facebook group named F.R.A (you can verify it by yourself), a girl told the rest how 'good person'was an old lady, who beat up his grandson (who was just learning to walk) after being bitten by the house's dog, she produly told the group that 'no question was asked' and she inmediatly figured out that the dog was innocent.
And many cheered it up!
Even in youtube videos, where little children got severely injured (look for instance, "perros atacan niño", there are comments accusing the victim that 'the kid must have provoked the dog, dog's won't attack without being provoked', and when I ask them to watch videos in youtube, like "Dog attacks Police Officer Taser Full News Report" they get angry, and many of them say I'm a nasty person, and that they refuse to watch the video.
FWIW, they openly say they prefer animals than humans, they don't bother to deny it.
Would you feel well, if you realize some of these individuals, is near your children on daily basis? Shouldn't PSYCHIATRY already have noticed them? Or are there studies of this mental illness that Im not aware of?
How is this news for nerds?
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Anyone who identifies themselves as an "animal rights" activist or supporter to the degree of valuing them over human lives should be denied any and all medical treatments derived from animal testing.
After all, they wouldn't want to be hypocrites, right? Right??
While I'm not wild about animal testing, I recognize the necessity. Moreover, I know you can't "liberate" an animal that might survive a week in the wild, if that. Do these morons plan to give their immunosuppressed rats nice comfortable homes for the rest of their lives? From experience I can tell you that cats and dogs raised in lab environments emphatically do NOT make good pets and certainly can't care for themselves. If released, they will simply starve slowly. I'm also guessing that the people who released the animals dont' have the money to sustain them all to the end of their lives and that one way or another, most will end up in a public facility, euthanized. At taxpayer expense, of course.
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I don't see why it would be unethical if we allowed people to be used for testing. We're rational and self-aware beings.
The people could be paid for it and we'll know for sure that the treatments/medications/whatever actually works on humans.
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Can we please distinguish between animal research ie. research which uses animal models to do science and animal testing, which uses animals to screen compounds?
Can we stop using that rasict word yet?
I don't like animal testing but I understand it's a necessary evil. We either test on animals or humans, and animals have less worth in our society (in any society) than people do. Animal testing has brought us many of our medical advances, and it's crazy to think we'd be where we are without it.
If these people really want to make a difference in the world, they should work towards ensuring animal testing is done in the most ethical way possible. That will have a lasting change instead of what they did here.
Acts of violence or anarchy don't change anything. Peaceful measures do, but it's easier to break a storefront window, or a cut a lock, or spraypaint some meaningless scrawl on public property than it is to support peaceful measures. So the losers will always be doing things like this, because they aren't committed enough to their cause to take the hard path.
Hundred years ago or so when most of west was dominantly religious people believed that a fellow human being was created after God's image, which added an extra value to humans. And therefore "being human" by helping sick, poor, undeveloped or otherwise unlucky people was considered a noble thing, and this is what we mostly refer by phrase "faith in humanity restored", which often is related to "living for a higher cause". A human was more than a mere animal with extraordinary mental skills.
Now subtract that extra value from humans and we are just highly developed animals who endanger other species and our planet and it would be better off if none of us existed. In this light reducing population with conspired wars, spreading diseases, starvation and whatever other perverse means will be praised as "saving the planet".
My understanding is that using animals to test drugs is dodgy at best, and akin to random chance. I.e., sometimes the drug works in and human, sometimes it works in one and not the other, and soemtimes it works in neither. I've heard microdosing in humans is the new hotness because it's more accurate to humans and keeps the animal rights folks happy. Seems like a win-win, but I'm interested to hear clarifications about either notion (efficacy of animal testing and efficacy of microdosing).
There is no known genetic marker for schizophrenia, however if you lock people up and subject them to degrading and arbitrary treatment they do eventually exhibit all the symptoms of schizophrenia.
The security team should have shot all of them on sight, or at least injected them with a disease curable only by a treatment derived from animal testing.
We got those in Europe which is why we're still fighting the Frankenstein creations from Monsanto.
This is another area of endeavour which should provide more transparency. Activists are highly motivated by conspiracy, misinformation and "subterfuge". Also, there are financial motivators in much research that jostle for top spot with ethics.
In vivo testing has a dark history, even for ground breaking researchers:
Effect of cortical implantation of radioactive cobalt on learned behaviour of rhesus monkeys. J Comp Physiol Psychol. 1955.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow
There are products developed for human consumption which require a lot of animal testing but which products in themselves should just not be created in the first place.
"As of March 11, all personal care products, from high-end to drugstore brands, will be subject to the rules, which means that final products cannot be testing on animals and nor can any of a given products' ingredients."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/06/cosmetic-testing-animals-skincare-makeup_n_2632526.html
Sunshine is best disinfectant.
i think it is noble of the protestors to value the lives of mice and rabbits so highly. But they have wimped out. It would be far better for the activists to have fastened themselves in the cages in place of the other critters.
that would be those who think inbred mice or rabbits are a good model for study of autism or schizophrenia
So ... in the unlikely event that I'm ever designing an experimental protocol which involves animals, then the low cost of subcutaneous RFID tags for all animals becomes pretty easy to justify. And maintaining an off-site database.
Might be a bit big for mice ; maybe tattooing with combinations of different UV-fluorescent dyes?
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