bend this baby....

Well today during lunch I happenned across a copy of a paper called the Hellbender Press. It is a local rag that specializes in environmental and animal welfare issues. Normally that is the kind of thing that I am in great support of. I mean hell we all have to share our little rock, and not just with other Homo sapiens, but one article in this issue in particular sat me off. It was a write up talking about the unethical and cruel treatment of animals in scientific research. This was also an article that cited a lot of the dribble that was being spouted from PETA. I am sorry people but get a frickin clue...If it wasn't for animal research you wouldn't be sitting around on your fat asses until age 80. You would have been dead a long time before the age of 50 without little things like antibiotics for example. Diseases like Diabetes would still mean slow painful lingering death, and organ transplants....forget those! Prior research (using animals) from the project I work on has been used to decrease the need for ventilators and stay time in intensive care units, not to mention decreased the mortality of people with acute respiratory distress syndrome. Well if you still want to argue that animals have just as many rights as people keep this in mind: Without animal testing the lives of our companions would be just as drastically decreased! Cats and dogs can become diabetic, there is such a thing as feline leukemia, and dogs do suffer from painful arthritis. All of which we can treat due to animal testing.

"But why can't we just use cells or a computer program or some other bullshit to do all this?" If people who say this crap had any idea of how intricate the cell to cell and system to system interactions are they would shit their pants and be in a corner sucking their thumb in wonder. The fact is time and time again in SCIENCE ,where things are tested (sometimes in animals), it has been shown time and time again that things that may seem like a good idea in cells or on paper can have disasterous results in vivo (that means in a living organism kiddies). I could spend the rest of the night citing examples. I'm sorry people but not once have I personally, nor have I ever seen anyone else mistreat a lab animal. Personally I know at the University of Tennessee it takes an act of friggin congress just to get an animal protocol approved, and that is only after you prove without a doubt that there is no other way to test your theory. So the next time you are kissing your grandparents for their 65th birthday, or you see a child with type 1 diabetes who lived past age 4 think about the work and sacrifices made by both the people and the animals that made that possible and fucking appreciate it. Because I will personally tell you killing an animal for science is not easy or fun, fact of the matter is it sucks. It sucks monkey balls, but it is a necessary evil. So deal with it.