Strong retort to "whiny and weak" piece by University of Iowa researcher

On Sunday August 28, the Orlando Sentinel reprinted a piece from the July 17 Washington Post in which a researcher describes an attack on his laboratory by animal rights activists he calls terrorists. The alert about the original piece is on my website at
http://www.DawnWatch.com/7-05_Animal_Media_Alerts.htm#LAB and the August 28 reprint is on the Orlando Sentinel website at http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/orl-insinsanimalrights28082805aug28,0,2528536.story

Thursday, September 1, the Orlando Sentinel has run an opinion piece in response, headed "Appreciate animal-rights restraint." The author, Christopher Murphy, challenges the hyperbolic terms Blumberg uses to describe the attack. His piece is on line at http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/orl-myword0105sep01,0,6203015.story?coll=orl-opinion-headlines and I will paste it below.

We can keep the issue of animal testing alive in the paper with letters either wholeheartedly supporting Murphy's piece, or condemning militant action but still discussing the tremendous suffering of animals in laboratories, in experiments often done for trivial purposes. The Orlando Sentinel takes letters at insight [at] orlandosentinel.com and advises, "Each letter should be 250 words or fewer and include the writer's name and day and evening telephone numbers for verification purposes."


Appreciate animal-rights restraint
Christopher Murphy

September 1, 2005

University of Iowa researcher Mark S. Blumberg's Sunday Insight piece describing vandalism and harassment by the Animal Liberation Front, whose members he suggests should be labeled as "terrorists," was so whiny and weak I was embarrassed for him, his family and the university. Intruders rescued rats and mice on which Blumberg and others were experimenting. They spilled chemicals and damaged equipment. They videotaped their visit and sent a copy to the university. They also called Blumberg and his colleagues mean names, sent him mean e-mails and signed him up for a lot of magazine subscriptions.

There was disruption, expense and loss of data. No one died. No one was injured. No one so much as suffered a paper cut, yet Blumberg describes the incident in terms so hyperbolic, I am concerned for his sanity. My favorite example, one that should get him fired from the university and laughed into hiding, was that he found the vandalism and insulting e-mails more harrowing than having his house broken into in the early 1980s by armed robbers who tied him up and stuck snub-nosed revolvers in his face. I mean, really, I can't think of a victim of a violent home invasion who wouldn't have preferred having his office wrecked while he was on vacation.

Blumberg goes on, with weepy righteousness, about how difficult it was for him to learn that after freeing them from their cages, the animal-rights intruders mixed baby mice with adult mice that weren't their mothers, all but ensuring they would be eaten. How much nicer it would have been for them to be killed by Blumberg via poison or freezing or other methods as painful. Readers aren't sure because nowhere in the piece does its author mention what really happens to them. Further, it's convenient that only rats and mice were saved from that University of Iowa lab. That way, Blumberg also can avoid mentioning the armies of cats, dogs, monkeys and chimpanzees he and others in the research industry torture and kill annually.

How stupid he must think his readers are.

Blumberg claims the folks who trashed his laboratory have a distrust of and disdain for science. I don't think that's true. I think they like science but have a distrust of and disdain for people who torture and kill animals in its name. Science can be furthered without animal experimentation. Regrettably, those who make money breeding mice, monkeys and beagles, the dog of choice for animal experimentation, are able to spend it in amounts sufficient to convince most people it can't.

No group in United States history has won rights without inflicting, and suffering, violence. The Revolutionary War, abolition, women's suffrage, labor rights, civil rights, rights of the unborn -- all these movements have been, and continue to be, stained with violence. Blumberg and his crybaby colleagues got off with broken computers, graffiti and subscriptions to Time and TV Guide. Instead of likening animal-rights activists to actual terrorists, they should be thanking them for their restraint.

Christopher Murphy lives in Orlando.
(END OF SENTINEL OP-ED)

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(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. If you forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts please leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)