Violence, patriarchy and nonhuman animal “research”



In recent news, a man was arrested for murdering a Yale graduate student in an animal research laboratory at Yale University. At this animal “research” lab the students, professors and technicians engaged in the following kinds of projects:

At Yale University, the IACUC permitted psychiatry professor Marina Picciotto to measure despair in mice by forcing them to swim in pools of water with no resting platform or by hanging them from their tails. For each group of mice, despair was measured by how little they were still willing to struggle to save themselves.

In another study, Picciotto bored holes into rats’ skulls, injected chemicals directly into their brains, and then decapitated the animals and froze their heads. In a study on learned helplessness, she exposed mice to 360 inescapable shocks. And in yet another experiment, Picciotto deprived monkeys of fluids and then gave them Kool-Aid mixed with liquid nicotine as their sole source of fluid. The amount of nicotine ingested by one monkey reached the equivalent of smoking 17 packs of cigarettes per day.

The fact that this systematic torture of nonhuman animals passes for research should give people pause. This student, Annie Le, and her killer were engaged in this activity day in and day out. Cutting holes in skulls, injecting chemicals, feeding monkeys poisonous chemicals we already know cause cancer. As usual the mainstream press merely mentions the fact that this is a research lab, but has failed to mention what the people inside that laboratory do to other living creatures every single day. No motive has been proffered for the killing of the student. But perhaps her killer was desensitized to violence through these horrific practices.

The Dutch organization, Wakker Dier (trans. “Animal Awake”) hired Dutch Playmate and fetish model Ancilla Tilia to play the part of a stripper who gets clubbed and stripped of her organs like a fish. (Warning, graphic video)

In addition, the fact that a male has killed a non-white female in this crime is an additional factor to ponder. As Nekeisha Alexis-Baker has noted, there is an intimate connection between slavery, patriarchy and speciesism. And unfortunately, even animal welfare groups exploit women to try to get their message across. As if anybody will be convinced by the type of ads this Dutch group has produced.

Whether it is the mainstream media, or animals rights groups, separating the violence done to nonhuman animals, women and people of color by dominant groups misses the way oppressions and violences reinforce one another and set the conditions for which the other violences can happen at all.

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