Vivisector pops a cork

Madison... On Saturday, September 24, Dr. Mary Schneider, a primate vivisector at the Harlow Primate Psychology Lab at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, was on her way in to shop at the local co-op.

She noticed an information table set up at the entrance and stopped to have a look. To her horror, the table was covered with literature pointing out the cruelties and worthlessness of animal experimentation, and worse, most of the information concerned primate vivisection at the UW.

Mary grabbed one of the fliers and began browbeating one of the people at the table. "This is my co-op!" she scolded. "You people ... blah, blah, blah. I'm going to complain to the manager!"

At our co-op, members voice their complaints, suggestions, etc. by filling out a little card. The management responds in writing when appropriate. The member's comment and the co-op's response are placed in a ring-bound stack of comments at the entrance and available for public review.

Mary Schneider's complaint:

Mary Schneider Member # 6526

"Please do not allow anti-animal research groups to distribute materials/propaganda (i.e. PeTA etc.) We need a wide range of approaches to cures for cancer, Parkinson's, MS, etc. including animal research with proper oversight, natural remedies, etc."

The response was, essentially, "Get over it." The co-op has a policy of allowing members to table so long as they do not use aggressive confrontational methods like trying to hand out info as people enter and leave. But placing info on a table is well within the co-op's policies.

What makes any of this even marginally interesting is the list of reasons Mary gives for supporting vivisection. Mary herself has a long-running federal grant to study the effects of fetal alcohol exposure on rhesus monkeys. She has discovered that, like humans, rhesus monkeys suffer long-term consequences from fetal alcohol exposure.

Why didn't she mention this on her list of justifications? No one in the UW monkey labs is working on cancer.

Her response seems indicative of a common position among vivisectors. They know that their own work is bogus, but hey, the money's good. They justify all animal research with the fallacious argument that someone somewhere must be doing something that will turn out to be important sometime in the future, and appeal to the public's fear of diseases like cancer.

Or why didn't she list prenatal stress? The director of the Harlow Lab, Chris Coe, has spent a career demonstrating that repeatedly startling a pregnant rhesus monkey can influence the immunological responses of the offspring later in life. Why didn't Mary mention that?

There is just so much that Mary could have pointed to that is happening in her own lab that, for some reason, she didn't. Instead she pulled cancer out, and then, apparently to convince the co-op management of her earth-mother goodness, appealed to "natural remedies." What a crock.