"Every drug anybody takes was tried first in animals,"" said Frankie Trull, executive directory of the Foundation for Biomedical Research. At present, researchers at the California School of Medicine at Davis are infecting rhesus monkeys with simian AIDS to test treatment of the drug AZT (Cowley 52).
Granted, most people recognize the fact that what we do to animals, one could never conscionably do to humans. As individuals, we each acknowledge certain rights that prevent us from being eaten, worn, or experimented on by other people. What we don't realize " until we really examine our beliefs about animals " is that rights cannot belong exclusively to human beings. A cow killed, skinned, dismembered, and ground up is instantly beef or leather. A laboratory rat, an individual being itself, is reduced to a "research tool" or "model". Though a hard " if not impossible " concept to grasp, like humans, animals are sentient, meaning they are able to experience pain and suffering and lead emotional lives. They are simply in laboratories because we as humans have the ability to put them there. Rhesus monkeys currently being experimented on at Cal are forced to undergo cataract surgery after being subjected to distorted vision incurred by a human-planted opaque contact lens. After a period of time, the primates are killed and then cranially dissected to measure brain adaptation that has taken place (Cowley 52). Such activity is merely the consummation of years of animal neglect by researchers, says naturalist Roger Caras. "They (animals) have the right not to have pain, fear or physical deprivation inflicted upon them by us . not to be bruatalized in any way as food resources, for entertainment or any other purposes- (Caras 57). The naturalist also wonders aloud if we, as humans, "have the right to subject animals that would never smoke to the same cancers and diseases as humans- (Caras 57)?.
