“The USDA’s own Inspector General issued a very scathing report about the lack of enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act by the Department of Agriculture. And I think that this agency tends to see itself, its role really as assisting, helping out the entities that it regulates as opposed to really doing anything to protect animals.” Katherine Meyer
“People say, well we’ve got animal welfare regs, they’re fine. No, they’re not fine. Not when you can do that to a chimpanzee. Legally do that to a chimpanzee.” – Roger Fouts
“Here you have human beings who basically have no autonomy, no consciousness, no sentience at all being treated as legal persons with a whole panoply of rights. And here you have, say chimpanzees or bonobos, who are pygmy chimpanzees, who are extraordinarily cognitively complex, who have autonomy, who should have dignity, and yet they’re treated as things. So as a matter of equality there is something wrong here.” – Steve Wise Please note: There are two versions of this clip. For the shorter version, please see The Principle of Equality.
“If your IACUC committee deems it is necessary for the science, there’s nothing that cannot be done to an animal in research and the Animal Welfare Act has absolutely no jurisdiction over that.” -Theodora Capaldo
“We allow animals to be treated in ways which if we treated humans that way would be considered as torture…But those things are customary within the industry.“ – Gary Francione
“The chimpanzees…were struck or kicked or had something thrown at them…but they also sometimes just got hit out of the blue by the Head Trainer and my sense was that he did that to keep them focused and keep them paying attention to him.” Sarah Baeckler
“You’re not really gonna have any kind of law substantially creating circumstances where animals are going to be treated well if that law has nothing ultimately to do with the mission of the enterprise, with the end result that they want. Think about it, it’s not gonna happen.“ – Lee Hall
“What the Fish and Wildlife Service did, is it issued a special regulation that said, we are going to designate chimpanzees in the wild as Endangered but we’re going to keep captive chimpanzees listed as Threatened, subject to this special rule. The special rule being none of the protections of the statute apply.” – Katherine Meyer
“We have a Federal law that targets people who…are accused of doing certain crimes that would have been considered criminal anyway but now because it’s against an animal enterprise the penalties are far stricter.” – Lee Hall
“The Animal Welfare Act is a statute that was passed by Congress in the 1960’s to protect certain animals from inhumane treatment.” -Katherine Meyer
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