ETHICAL DILEMMAS: Cherie Wilson Interviewed.

by Claudette Vaughan

Ethics Committees were set up to police (but not abolish) the vivisection industry. A tactic often used by the vivisection industry  is to show themselves through squeaky-clean laboratories,  exposing only what they want the community to see. So how can animal activists find out on what does go on behind closed doors when we are not invited in to create change?

Cherie Wilson was prepared to speak to the Abolitionist-Online on the impotence of ethics committees and how the name itself is an oxymoran.

Q.  What’s some of your background Cherie?

A.  I’ve been on various ethics committees now for 12 years.  I don’t approve of any of the experiments but what it’s shown me is if the public knew about many of them,  they wouldn’t approve of them either.   Let me make myself quite clear.  I don’t approve of any animal experimentation.  The problem with ethics committees is they seem to be formed to make the general public think that everything’s OK because it’s assumed they are looking after an animal’s best interests.  The only reason why I’ve been doing this for so long now, even though I oppose all experiments, is I’m often the only thing standing between a nonhuman animal locked in cage and an experimenter.  Sometimes, just sometimes, I can provide a little comfort to a lab animal.

Q.   Pro-animal rights people can’t stop experiments from occurring by sitting on these committees because the system isn’t designed like that and they are out-numbered by researchers.     If ethics committees are so effective, why is animal usage escalating in Australia?

A.  All I am saying is people like myself who are concerned for animals can only provide a band-aid service on Ethics committees.  When we go to the animal-houses and I look at individual animals, I know if I am not there they’ll go without any painkillers.  That’s about the most I can do for things. Nobody could approve of many of the experiments I have seen.  That’s why I am speaking up.   For instance, the ethics committee I am now on is for the Department of Primary Industries.  Some of the experiments are for medical research, some of them are production orientated. 

In Australia it’s legal to use growth hormones in pigs.  This is not approved of in other country in the world but it’s being done here.  It’s called Porcine Growth hormone.  They inject it into the pig every day for a period of 3-4 weeks.  This is difficult for farmers to do as they might have 30-40 pigs in their pens.  So you’re injecting one, and you don’t know if you have injected this one or that one so some of them get twice the dose and others don’t get any. 

These experiments are about trying to develop a slow-release way of putting a silicon implant under the pig’s skin.  First, let me make it clear that I don’t approve of giving them the porcine growth hormone experiment in the first place let alone approve of doing  experiments to see how to do it by a slow release mechanism.   Another type of experiment is called ‘Basic Research.’   This is where the researchers and scientists don’t know a lot about something so they start doing experiments on animals as a human model. For example, female sheep and reproduction. 

There’s a hell of a lot of money being sunk into this scheme because they are looking at stress and reproduction.  So this problem in western society is women are stressed and not as fertile as they would like to be, so they are looking at sheep and agricultural animals to provide answers.   Their logic is agricultural animals are stressed in the intensive-farming system so, how can we get them to reproduce even when they are under a lot of stress?   That’s where ‘Basic Research’ comes in.  They are taking sheep and they’re actually performing operations on them so they can inject hormones directly into their brains.  They are trying to mimic what happens at different times when you are stressed.  They take blood samples from certain sheep at different times of the day, from the beginning right through to the end.  Every experiment they do creates another question and then they do another experiment then another experiment and so the cycle goes on.  Because this type of thing goes under the title of “Basic Research” they can get away with it and this type of experiment can go on for years.  Of course what experiments should be looking at is how to reduce stress in humans with humans rather than how to get sheep to reproduce when they are stressed.

Q.  Isn’t it at all obvious to these people on ethics committees to administer pain relief to a suffering animal?

A.   No.  It’s doesn’t always happen.  Take this group I’m on.  They perform experiments on agricultural farm animals.  How they justify not providing pain relief is by saying something like:  “If you look at animals out in the field, we mulesing them, we castrate them, and they’re not given any painkillers.”     What the experimenters say is this:  “If you go out to the real world, the animals don’t get any painkillers,  so why give them to them now?

Another time there was a rat being used in a experiment and I’ll say to the committee:  “You can’t do that.  You can’t inject that poison into this rat.”  The experimenters will say:  “OK, you can help the rat in the experiment but you can’t help the rat caught in a rat bait –a wild rat in the open.”

It’s an insidious argument and it’s this prevailing attitude I have trouble with.

The other major problem I have with them is duplication.  At the Primary Industries Department they are thinking of doing experiments on how to kill a chicken ‘humanely’. I’m sure this has all been done before, if not here, than overseas.   So why are they killing a lot more animals for data that’s already been provided for elsewhere?

At the moment they’re doing experiments to find out if furnished cages improve the welfare of a battery hen.  

Q.   Does ‘improve the welfare’ mean the battery hens laying capacity?

A.   What the experimenters are doing is checking the hens cortisone level.   When both humans and nonhumans are stressed they release cortisone.  So what they do is they keep taking blood tests of these animals to see how much cortisone is floating around in their blood.  They assume that if there’s not a lot of cortisone present in the blood of the animal,  then the animal is not stressed.   The design of the experiment is fundamentally flawed before it begins. E.g., if you have a sow and she’s in a sow stall she might start off very stressed but after a little while she’ll give up hope and become depressed.   At this stage anyone looking isn’t going to find a lot of cortisone in her blood.   I would say to the committee “I’m sure this experiment has been done numerous times overseas.  Why are you re-doing it?” and they would always say they were doing it to suit Australian conditions.  But what’s the difference between a battery shed in Australia, from a battery shed in England?   There’s no answer to that and the experimenters can’t provide an answer either.

What happens to those of us who tend to speak up is the committee acknowledges that you have spoken up, that you don’t approve of this experiment, and they’ll even put it in the minutes if you insist, but the point is, it doesn’t change anything.  The way the ethics committee is organised is you are so far out-numbered you haven’t got a chance.   If you are the voice for the animals but you might have 10 experimenters there and 2 pro-animal representatives if you are lucky.  And then you have the Category D people.   These are,  supposedly, the representatives of the community.  I’ve seen a lot of them come and go through our ethics committee and none of them have said anything.  You wonder what they are doing there in the first place.

Q.  Why are you willing to speak out when so few aren’t?

A.  I’m incredibly frustrated with the system.  One of the few reasons I’m on an ethics committee is to find out what’s going on inside a laboratory.  Every now and then you can get some info out there and it can be useful but really, there’s not much that can be done sitting on committees.

Q.  What other experiments do you find deeply disturbing?

A.  I had several arguments on this notion of ‘Basic Research’.  The experimenters are injecting sheep with nitric oxide (which is laughing gas).  The idea is if you give that to them then they’ll be less stressed.   What they are trying to do is mimic a situation where a sheep is at a abattoir. The sheep is kept for 24 hours before she is killed and then they round her up, then they give her some laughing gas and then they kill her.   The consensus is:  if an animal is stressed often the meat is not very good quality. So what they are doing is stressing the animal and then giving the animal laughing gas in the hope the meat will not be spoiled.  That line of experiment has deeply disturbed me for a while now.  I keep objecting but they reason:  we’re not doing it to stress animals before we kill them.  It’s because it’s for ‘Basic Research’.

Q.  …the abuser’s language…

A.  Yes. Definitely.  They can call anything “Basic Research” and it paves the way for them to do what they like to animals.  People look up to these experimenters so much. My experience has been experimenters are ordinary people who want to keep their job.  Often I think the reason they keep coming up with these experiments is just so to continue to get paid!

Another experiment is the experimenters want to speed up producing more cows.   They’ll take calves,  which normally wouldn’t be able to mate, and they will harvest the egg from the very young cows,  so they can then do in vitro fertilisation and put them into other cows and grow them on in other cows.   After this intrusion has been done a number of times on calves and cows alike, they often end up infertile because they have been damaged internally.   The whole idea behind this is to manufacture an ‘elite’ line of cows.

Another experiment that really bothers me is the genetically engineered pigs experiments.  The transgenic pigs research is directed towards organ transplants.    They are breeding these pigs and developing them and then they send them over to South Africa where their organs are being transplanted into baboons.  This is extremely controversial.   A moratorium was placed on this type of research in Australia but what the Primary Industries people are doing is sending the pigs over to South Africa to get it done.  The question is:  How responsible is this?   Experimenters have been doing this for a number of years.  Ethics committees will never, ever abolish animal usage. It’s not on their agenda.