Editorial 5#

Peter Singer’s latest proclamation that “HIV research would be more useful if it were carried out on brain-damaged humans rather than chimps” (see SX magazine) raised not one iota of an outrage from the animal rights community.

Nor did it create outrage in the never-never land of morality, philosophy, religion or from within the anti-specieism community either (see our interview with the interviewer Katrina Fox on the subject).

Activists who are working to abolish vivisection do not want one redundant model swapped for another redundant model.

Singer’s reasons for saying this are his own however the question must be asked: If we are not disability activists in support of our brothers and sisters who are mentally and physically challenged, then who are we? Since the inception of the animal rights movement its enemies have tried to make animal rights people look like a bunch of anti-human fools and this has managed to strengthen the vivisectors main cliché that animal rights people are myopic and unrealistic.

If the animal rights movement can move into a new phase in the coming years it will be to show that “animal rights” does not set up an automatic confrontation between human beings and animals, it enjoins them in the struggle for clarity and justice.

In this issue, Respecting Diversity, we look at the origin of AIDS, then the politics of treatment, why animal experimentation does not work and what’s going on with the Christian right and their homophobic “condom” paranoia both in the United States of America, in Africa and in their headlong rush to conquer a condomless kingdom beyond that.

The Abolitionist is in agreement with both Dr. Alan Cantwell who wrote “Queer Blood” and “AIDS and the Doctors of Death” that AIDS is a man-made disease first designed to kill off homosexuals, people of colour and other “undesirables” in the beginnings of what we see now as this escalating New World Order. We are equally in agreement with the AIDS activist founder of the first ACT-UP, writer and playright Larry Kramer who once said “I have recently come to believe that gay men and women are tragic people. We are so wonderful but we are also so fucked up. So blind. So ignorant in ways to look after ourselves. So uninterested in the outside world that is subsuming us ....[We are] so without agendas to utilize our wonderfulness. We know who the enemy is and we just stand here letting them shoot us over and over again. WE STAND HERE AND LET THEM DO IT”.

And again when on the subject of Bush’s Administration,“ I do not see us, don’t you see? They are killing us. They are eradicating us from this earth. Little by little by little we are disappearing. I do not see us and I am beginning to see us less and less”.

Unfortunately he didn’t grant Peter Gill author of “Body Count How They Turned AIDS Into A Catastrophe” an interview (see our interview with Peter Gill) but he did say something very telling to the author via email. He said, “ Every single person who has died has died because of official negligence…I have no doubt that AIDS is a plague that has been intentionally allowed to happen and to continue. This is no longer crazy talk. The facts support it”.

When Peter Gill spoke about the generosity of the new American response to AIDS in the poor world and the moral obligation America had undertaken to continue to provide drugs for Africa, Larry Kramer replied, “You think they care? I’m sure they’ll find many excuses to say people don’t qualify. You don’t understand. They don’t give a shit and nobody is holding their feet to the fire”.

Spelling it out again - HIV or AIDS is not a gay disease. HIV is caused by a virus, not a genetic effect or by a particular lifestyle. Poverty is not the reason for AIDS in Africa. The expensive drugs required to manage the disease have been kept back from the poor by the pharmaceutical companies and corporate interests. AIDS is a genocide, breathtaking in its painful implications, its effects and its outreach.

An Open Letter To the Gay/Lesbian/Trans-gendered Community from the Animal Rights Movement - written by the Abolitionist-Online.

In Sydney, the gay community has fought long and hard to gain rights for themselves that is justly due. In comparison the animal rights movement is in its infancy.

The AIDS and gay community has been led to believe that animal experiments are indispensable to finding a cure for AIDS. This is not true. The HIV virus that causes human AIDS does not cause the disease in laboratory animals. AIDS is species-specific. This means that after two decades of trying, chimpanzees and monkeys were infected with this disease, but did not get human AIDS. What we know about the disease has come from studying people with AIDS. (see Dr Greek’s interview on AIDS and Animal Experimentation).

The AIDS establishment and the animal rights/liberation movement are both groups who are the most politically outspoken in forever questioning and demanding answers from the biomedical establishment. In no other time in history has the AR movement needed to be so outspoken for laboratory victims. We need to fight for their rights which to date they have virtually no rights whatsoever. No researcher has ever been prosecuted in Australia under the Animal Welfare Act for cruelty to nonhuman animals. Historically we know that there’s been a deliberate intent in the biomedical establishment to try and pit gay rights and animal activists against one another.

The Animal Rights Movement of Australia asks and needs the support of the Gay/ Lesbian and Transgendered community for the battle ahead against big business and vested interests. The animal rights movement, obviously, wants a cure for AIDS but it won’t come from out of animal experimentation. Over 25 years of AIDS research with animal experimentation into AIDS research for a cure has produced not much more than wealthy primate researchers and literal dead ends.

THE EARLY DAYS

In the early 1980s people began contracting a peculiar unnamed disease. Some people were dying of it. The phenomenon of AIDS hadn't hit the scene yet. There were no hospital beds and no doctors and nurses dedicated to its cure. No research had been conducted upon it, no government had pronounced it and the gay community had not been badly disrupted by it---yet.

AIDS is now widely accepted as a major medical condition, involving the breakdown of the body's immune system and the subsequent invasion of the host cell by a wide range of opportunist infections and tumours.

It is almost certainly caused by a family of viruses transmitted through bodily fluids and resulting in a spectrum of disease. No one is disputing that AIDS has become the crisis of modern times. It is pandemic, infectious and its growth rate seems to be near exponential.

In 1990 somewhere between 60-90,000 people in Australia were estimated to be HIV infected. The gay community has overcome tragedy and intimations before, but when the disease first made itself known, they also had to contend with fear, hatred, homophobic and ignorance from a straight community who did not understand why people were dying from this very rare and lethal form of cancer known as Kaposi Sarcoma.

This devastating medical epidemic of modern times brought in its wake emotional turmoil, confusion and despair. The psychological and political climate of the times was complex and rife with rumour. The gay community was rightly frightened, as the disease unjustly became known as the "Gay Plague".
And so under these circumstances, the pharmaceutical companies started animal based research into AIDS, knowing full well that the winner would stand to make billions out of finding a cure.

THE AIDS CHALLENGE

AIDS is particularly nasty. It is one thing to be dying -enough burden for anyone; but then to be plagued with debt in return for services that, truth be told, alleviate little or nothing of the patients pain, is too much to bear for one pair of shoulders. These people -our people, our species -are walking deaths with skin drawn, many friends withdrawn, their flesh falling away. At the end, AIDS sufferers are barely kept alive at all by large transfusions of blood, which will eventually give way to death.

So who, on the surface at least, could blame anyone for refusing to sign a petition for fear of holding up a cure for AIDS?

ANIMAL BASED RESEARCH

We want a cure for AIDS just as much as the AIDS community itself. Vivisectors say that animals are similar enough to humans to justify experimenting on them. This is a lie. For one thing their physiology is different. The fact remains that monkeys do not get full-blown AIDS. Humans do.

Trying to recreate spontaneous human diseases in a healthy animal is ethically and scientifically wrong. Animal based research is not responsible for vaccines, anaesthesiology, antibiotics and medications that combat AIDS, the side effects, chemotherapy, or modern surgical techniques.

Experiments on non-human primates have a long history of misleading scientists about AIDS. The current medications used to treat AIDS were discovered in a test-tube reliant on no animal based research whatsoever.
Dr Mark Feinberg, a leading AIDS researcher stated, "What good does it do to test something {vaccine} in a monkey? You find five or six years from now that it works in the monkey, and then you test it in humans and you realise that animals behave totally differently from monkeys, so you've wasted five years".

Non human animals react differently to drugs, vaccines and other chemicals, not only from humans but from each other histologically, physiologically, immunologically, sexually, socially and a host of other ways as well. The most infamous example of this difference is the drug Thalidomide

SOLUTIONS

"After decades of AIDS research the search for the perfect non-human model has become an end in itself", says Betsy Todd, RN,MPh.

The public has been lead to believe that animal-based experiments are indispensable in AIDS research. Yet what has lead us to enjoy the highest standard of medical care, she concludes, is a base of epidemiological studies, in vitro research, clinical research and observation, autopsies, research conducted on human tissue, mathematical modeling studies, and technological advances. This is where funding should be focused.

And what of the non-human animals already lost to us through AIDS research. Have their lives been in vain? For over 4000 years now a thick and impenetrable legal wall has determined the way in which animals are treated, i.e., as mere property. Unless humans learn to fight for them, other animals will never have any rights and will continue to be exploited. This might be a hot topic of debate at the moment, but who in the gay, lesbian and transgendered community cannot relate to their own personal experience of injustice, discrimination or prejudice?
The animal rights movement will disseminate accurate factual information about AIDS in the hope that they myths and misinformation can be corrected.

Animal experimentation is rotten at its very core. Annually it leads billions of animals worldwide to their deaths for no reason whatsoever.

In Australia, through trial and error, the pro-active gay, lesbian and transgendered community has achieved certain qualities needed by we in the animal rights movement. The AR movement needs to emulate the gay communities ability to be politically active and mobalize ourselves in such a way that politicians will be forced to take us seriously.

Giving a voice to the voiceless at this time we will need the gay and lesbian community on our side to do it. To linger now would be to lose not only for the animals, our brothers and sisters of another species, but for all of us who are fighting against social injustice and ignorance in all its myriad manifestations. At some point in 2007 we are going to do a vegan religious non-speciesist issue so please if you are Muslim, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu or any other faith with an exciting animal story to be told we want to hear from you.

THANK YOU TO ALL OUR CONTRIBUTORS

This site is dedicated to: Barry Horne, Jill Phipps, Mike Hill, Tom Worby, the Australian Diana Simpson. And Ronnie Lee