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Animal Researchers Expect New Legal Rights in Wisconsin

June 13, 2011, 1:19 pm

Animal research conducted at the University of Wisconsin and other institutions in the state may soon have strong new legal protection. The Capital Times, a newspaper in Madison, Wis., is reporting that language quietly inserted into a budget bill nearing final passage in the state Legislature would give researchers at colleges and universities across Wisconsin an exemption from state laws concerning crimes against animals as long as the investigators are “engaged in bona fide scientific research.” Administrators at the University of Wisconsin at Madison sought the protection after facing threats of legal action over some of their animal research, the newspaper reported.

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  • moonbow

    It seems to me that we live in an era when we should be moving away from animal research. What gives, Univeristy of Wisconsin?

  • lslerner

    It’s hard to find a silver lining in the current rape of the State of Wisconsin by the GOP-controlled goverment, but this is one good outcome. Animal research is absolutely necessary to many fields of biology, allied sciences, and medicine, and the laws pushed by the “animal-rights” folks (who oppose all conceivable interaction between humans and other animals) have been a real impediment.

  • hmcleaver

    It is simply not the case that animal-rights advocates are
    “opposed to all conceivable interaction between humans and other
    animals”. What they are opposed to is the cruelty to other species that
    happens when those others are seen as nothing more than expendable resources in
    human pursuits. What they seek are the kinds of changes in human behavior that
    occur when humans come to see themselves as one part of an ecological whole in
    which the well-being and future of each part is dependent on the those of all
    the other parts and therefore all of those parts deserve respect and
    appreciation and do not deserve to be cruelly exploited.  Ideas about what such a change should mean for
    scientific research varies; there is no universally agreed position among
    animal-rights advocates. Some would eliminate ALL research that harms non-human
    animals in any way; others would apply rules to the use of animals in research
    similar to those that apply to the use of humans in research. The struggle for
    animal rights in some sense or another – for each to decide what they should be
    in practice – is every bit as meritorious as the struggle for human rights.
    Unfortunately, given the nature of contemporary capitalism where both humans
    and non-humans are systematically objectified, abused and exploited, the
    outlook of both struggles is not promising.

  • mbelvadi

    One can be engaged in bona fide research while at the same time choosing to use methods that are no longer the ‘state of the art’ in scientific terms while at the same time unnecessarily hurting animals. From the little this article tells us, this exemption goes too far in allowing researchers carte blanche, even farther than exemptions in animal cruelty laws that allow for “accepted agricultural practice”. Shouldn’t there at least be a limitation to “accepted scientific practice”? The “bona fide” clause doesn’t approach that requirement by itself.

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