FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, February 6, 2005
University of Iowa Researchers Attribute Animal Cries to “Sneezing”; Administer Electric Shocks Animals “Can Barely Feel”
Iowa- In recent interviews that severely stretch the imagination, UI researchers are claiming the animals they destroy don’t feel pain as their skulls are drilled and electric shocks are administered, in fruitless attempts to study human psychological illness.
UI Professor Mark Blumberg takes infant rats out of their nests, which are normally about 94 degrees, and placed them in temperatures of around 68 degrees. He then studies how the animals are able to adjust and tries to ascertain why the rats make squeaking sounds. “They are like sneezes in the sense that they serve a physiological function; they just happen to make a sound,” he said of the grunts.
Professor John Freeman electrically shocks rats to teach them to blink their eyes whenever a tone or light is activated. Freeman states the rats can barely feel the shock. According to his research proposal, this study “may lead to better understanding of the functional pathology associated with various developmental disorders that affect the nervous system, including fetal alcohol syndrome, exposure to environmental neurotoxins, infantile autism and Down syndrome.”
Both professors are guilty of blatant wishful thinking, and in all the years this research has been carried out, nothing useful in clinical medicine has been elucidated. Meanwhile, this year alone Freeman is draining $147,500 and Blumberg $110,895 from scarce NIH funds that could be used to help human beings in clinical and other types of studies.
In November, members of the Animal Liberation Front entered both researchers’ laboratories at the university and freed more than 400 imprisoned animals that faced lives of misery and torture at the hands of these experimenters. After all, electric shocks hurt, and infants cry when they are cold and miserable, they don’t “sneeze”.
Jerry Vlasak, MD, a former animal researcher and now an outspoken critic of animal experimentation, states that “Researchers like Freeman and Blumberg are frustrated physician-wannabes who find experimenting on helpless animals enhances their curriculum vitaes and earns them job security. Nothing they are doing will ever enhance the lives of human patients, no matter what bogus claims they put forth.”