Letter to the Editor: Don't test addiction on animals

To the Editor:

In Voices, Nov. 6, “Prof. targeted by animal rights extremists speaks out,” Professor Edythe London describes her justification for using primates in her “research to understand and treat nicotine addiction among adolescents,” while categorizing her work as “important research that advances the human condition.” London was responding to an attack on her house by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF).

A person can deplore the tactics of the ALF and still ask the question: Should innocent, sentient creatures have to pay the price for human addictions and indulgences? London has a personal connection to addiction; her father, a Holocaust survivor, “died an untimely death from complications brought about from nicotine dependence.”

There are ways to deal with human addictions other than animal testing. In a Nov. 9 Los Angeles Times article on smoking, a health expert noted that “with appropriate support and efforts and counter-marketing, tens of thousands of people don’t have to die.” In California, the percentage of adults who smoked (already well below the national average) decreased between 2004 and 2006 (to only 13.3%).

California has consistent funding for its education programs in large part because of high taxes on cigarettes. For another famous addiction, Alcoholics Anonymous is as effective as any drug. In any event, should non-human primates have to suffer to indulge misguided humans who decide to begin to smoke so many years after its dangers became widely known?

The human species is presently responsible for the worst mass extinction of life on Earth during the past 65 million years — that is, since the final demise of the dinosaurs. In my eyes and those of many others who love and value life, this is a holocaust of the highest order. This holocaust has various causes, but an important one surely is the perspective people have regarding the relative value of animal and human life.

Harmful experiments on intelligent non-human creatures for the purpose of catering to potential ailments of persons who have elected to smoke for their own pleasure demeans non-human species and sends out the wrong kind of message.

-Ben Zuckerman, Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy and a member of the Board of Directors, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society