The animal rights movement is devastating and destroying potentially life-saving basic research in physiology and biomedicine. It is also jeopardizing the future of science in the United States by propagandizing youngsters in elementary and high school and attacking teachers and students of science at the university level. It does so by harassing researchers and their families, picketing research institutions, and publicizing distorted information, even outright lies. Other tactics include breaking into buildings, stealing animals, smashing equipment, taking important data, and bombing laboratories.
Among other accusations, animal rights activists have charged scientists with conspiring to repeat each other's experiments in order to gain enormous funds from government agencies, putting electrodes into animals' brains in order to needlessly shock them, and regulating animals' behavior by sadistically inflicting pain.
Of course, all of this sounds like nonsense or worse to those of us who conduct research using live animals. But such are the ...
