Animal and Human Rights

i-ce27b1e033be525d787d70135ae8aa47-osubuzz.jpg

Earlier this week on Adventures in Ethics and Science, Dr. Free-Ride reported that a UCLA researcher faces renewed harassment from animal rights activists for talking about his work. Dr. Dario Ringach and his family have been the subject of invasive physical and personal attacks, and Dr. Free-Ride too has now been targeted by the "militant" animal rights group Negotiation is Over. Scicurious on Neurotopia decries these threatening tactics, writing "we shouldn't have to do our work in fear of threats, intimidation, and severe bodily harm." On Good Math, Bad Math Mark Chu-Carroll adds "animal research shouldn't be done for trivial purposes: the work must be important enough to justify subjecting living creatures to it." And DrugMonkey draws the line between human and non-human, asking if it's fair to call animals "sentient." Finally, Eric Michael Johnson offers an opposing viewpoint on The Primate Diaries, writing that vivisection "is a barbaric practice that has led to some necessary medical breakthroughs but has mostly served to profit multinational corporations." When words can be so strong, who needs to be a radical anyway?

Links below the fold.

More like this

(updated below) My piece for The Huffington Post has just gone up concerning the latest incidents involving neuroscientist Dario Ringach and the targeting of his children by animal rights extremists. For more on this see Dr. Free-Ride, PZ, PalMD, Scicurious, MarkCC, Nick Anthis, Drugmonkey and…
This post is off-topic for this blog, but there are some things that I just can't keep quiet about. Via my friend and fellow ScienceBlogger Janet over at Adventures in Ethics and Science, I've heard about some absolutely disgraceful antics by an animal rights group. To be clear, in what follows,…
Remember Dario Ringach? He's the scientist who has endured a prolonged campaign of harassment because of his animal research. I first heard of him in 2006, when, after a campaign of threatening phone calls, people frightening his children, and demonstrations in front of his home, gave up doing…
Earlier this month, I was remiss in not noting an update to a story about which I had written before, a story of domestic terrorism carried out by so-called "animal rights" advocates who are utterly opposed to the use of animals in research. The series of attacks began with an intimidation campaign…