Money vs. Suffering

The use of monkeys on the University of Wisconsin, Madison campus generates a large income stream for the university and great suffering in the labs. (Regarding animals generally, this essay's main idea is true about essentially every large university in the nation.)

Claims made by the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center and Harlow Primate Psychology Lab with regard to important medical discoveries are so readily recognized as propaganda and so easily debunked (like the claim that they have discovered the cause of PCOS,) that the only question worth considering is whether or not the suffering can be justified by the money and jobs.

Clearly, the university believes that the money is ample justification for the misery.

Is my analysis fair?

I believe it is. It appears that essentially no one within the administration, outside the labs, has taken any time to evaluate whether the researchers’ claims concerning medical progress are honest and accurate or meaningful.

The suffering on campus is so profound that any administrator professing a concern for animals’ pain, fear, welfare, or daily experiences, would necessarily be compelled to look at the details, to look at the claims and to become well educated about the issue.

But the university administration is content to rely upon the unexamined assurances made by the scientists earning their livelihoods on animal experimentation who swear that the experiments and the animal husbandry on campus are humane and result in important advances.

The quick and universal willingness to believe this transparently self-serving rhetoric is evidence that the calculus really is money vs. suffering. This is why they turn away from any concern from the public and go back to determining how they will spend the 40-plus% of the hundreds of millions of dollars they skim off the animal research money-train each and every year.