Be Kind to Animals, Have a Heart

15 August 2001, 11:33pm IST
Ingrid E Newkirk.

My dog `ms bea' was a rescued alsatian mix, a grand imposing canine presence. she hated joggers as they made her feel fat and children because they are too noisy and loved coming to work with me every day when i ran a large animal shelter. ms bea had several important jobs. one of them was to rise from her bed at the front desk and greet frightened dogs who were sometimes literally tossed through the door. when they saw her moving toward them with such self-assurance, obviously well fed, totally at home and happy as a clam, they stopped shaking and began wagging their tails. she worked long hours and loved every minute. she ate what we ate ^ indian aloo mattar was her favourite ^ and she rode the truck into the ``best'' and the most troubled neighbourhoods, looking out the window at them all. i loved her very much. ms bea was 17 years old when she died. i still think of her often, a dignified old girl who knew she looked silly when she carried her green plastic frog in her mouth, a dear friend and loving companion. when people ask me how i can object to experiments on animals, all i know is that if anyone had ms bea on the dissection table, i would be through that door in a minute, lock me up if you will. this wonderful companion is my litmus test of whether it is right to do things to animals. ms bea was not a thing. she had gender, individuality, life, love and understanding inside her. no one could ever convince me it would have been all right to burn her or starve her or test poisons on her ^ not to save me, my child or my other dog, if that were the case, and i believe it is never the case. it wouldn't have been right. all the animals are ms bea, in their own way. even the smallest of them, the ugliest or weirdest of them. i remember thinking exactly that when i toured a large government laboratory in the us. entering a room in a seemingly endless corridor of barren white-washed rooms, i found a baboon. i actually heard him first because he was banging his head so loudly against the solid steel sides of his cage. in this totally sterile, dull, windowless environment, he was so alive and so gaudy, almost surreal: a huge hydramus baboon, the size of a small man. he had a long dog snout that looked as if he had painted it with crazy red and pink and white and grey stripes. his long multicoloured hair stood out from his body like a big colourful cloak. how must he have felt when aliens snatched him from his jungle and transported him to this cold lonely world to die in a steel cage? most primates avoid making eye contact, yet this baboon stared straight at me. his eyes were filled not with despair, as one might expect, but with deep loathing. i made inquiries and found that the baboon and several others had been part of a cancer study that had been abandoned when the investigator moved to another country. the baboons had been forgotten and were just being kept in their cages and left to stare at the wall. eventually the government told me that it had no further use for the animals and killed them. i continued to visit the laboratory because i believed that the experimenters had the potential to have a change of heart and find another way to make a living. dr roger ulrich did. for years, he had experimented on monkeys and received many professional honours for his cruel experiments, using monkeys and rats to study the relationship between pain and aggression. in one experiment, he used electric shocks intense enough to cause paralysis. one day, ulrich wrote this to the american psychological association: ``when i was asked why i conducted these experiments, i used to say it was because i wanted to help society solve its problems of mental illness, crime, retardation, drug abuse, child abuse, unemployment, marital unhappiness, alcoholism, over-smoking, over-eating even war! although, after i got into this line of work, i discovered that the results of my work did not seem to justify its continuance. i began to wonder if perhaps financial rewards, professional prestige and the opportunity to travel were the maintaining factors and if we of the scientific community, supported by our bureaucratic and legislative systems, were actually part of the whole problem. ``one spring i was asked by a colleague, `dr ulrich, what is the most innovative thing that you've done professionally over the past year?' i replied, `dear dave, i've finally stopped torturing animals.' ''