Defining Animal RightsTreat All of God's Creatures Equally
By Gary YourofskyThe following editorial appeared in The Macomb Daily (Mich.) on June 18, 1997.

Joseph Perkins' May 21 column, "Rabid fringe pushes animal rights," was egregious. The prose was tainted with erroneous facts and assumptions. I'm not surprised, however, by Perkins' ignorance and hubris.

Let me briefly describe myself. I run a nonprofit animal rights group called ADAPTT. Moreover, I am a true humanitarian who cannot be deceived by society's prevarications, which are driven by money, power and dominance.

The column's first mistake was the failure to understand what Ingrid Newkirk said about animal experimentation. Besides explaining that all beings suffer alike, she was describing the biomedical community's credo for its fraudulent justification of vivisection. Since animal researchers believe that vivisection can benefit humans, the biomedical establishment is saying that a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.

Second, the story claimed that the polio vaccine was developed with monkeys. But the vaccine, invented in 1944, failed to destroy the artificially induced, polio-like symptoms that were re-created in the ensuing rhesus monkey experiments. In turn, the public was denied the vaccine until 1954 after Salk and his medical team realized that rhesus monkeys were anatomically, physiologically and immunologically different from humans. How many lives do you think were lost to polio during that wasted 10-year span?

Third, if anyone even considers chemotherapy to be a successful procedure, the technique was developed and refined through the true scientific methods of human-based clinical research, computer and mathematical models, and cellular and molecular biology.

Fourth, heart by-pass surgery was developed with the aforesaid methods and years of human trial-and-error operations.

Moreover, animal testing has not contributed one valuable piece of information relevant to a human, ever. Since animals don't get human diseases and humans don't get animal diseases, vivisection cannot work.

Since columnist Joe Perkins claims to be an informed journalist, then why doesn't he ask true scientists about medical inquiries? Instead he quotes Newkirk and uses PETA as a generic animal rights term like most people use the terms Xerox and Kleenex.

Furthermore, it is utterly despicable and downright ignominious that an African-American would be so condescending toward the subjugation of animals. As a Jewish person whose people were enslaved and murdered in Nazi Germany, I never want to see any sentient being put through a similar atrocity. Perkins and all African-Americans should feel the same about putting sentient beings through the manacles of slavery.

And don't misconstrue the aforementioned point. Animals are not more important than humans. But everyone must understand that importance and a comparative worth analysis are irrelevant to the way animals should be treated in this society. Simply put, all sentient beings deserve to be treated as equals.

If people want to learn the truth about animal rights, they should open their eyes and ears, feed their heads and not be embarrassed to admit that their lifestyle supports a cruel, pernicious industry of animal exploitation.

Gary Edwards
Tv Interview, regarding the Dog Meat Trade.

Neal Barnard
A psychiatrist by training, Neal Barnard has made a name for himself in animal-rights circles since 1985, when he founded the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an animal rights group dressed up as a medical association. From 1989 to 1991 he served as a Contributing Editor to The Animals' Agenda magazine, writing frequent columns on animal-rights topics. In 2003, he was nominated for the “Animal Rights Hall of Fame.”

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