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UW-Madison Professor Withdraws From Study in Protest of Colleague's Taser Experiments on Pigs
For 20 years, Professor Terry Young heard the dogs barking and crying on the floor below, day and night, from her office at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The animal experiments had always tormented her. An epidemiologist, Dr. Young's research involves studies with a long-term cohort of women.
Webster needed a long-term cohort of women for another, unrelated study, so he and Dr. Young submitted a quarter-million-dollar proposal to the National Institutes of Health, and the grant was all but assured.
That is, until Dr. Young read PETA's letter protesting Webster's experiment in the campus newspaper and contacted PETA.
Dr. Young was so outraged by Webster's Taser tests on pigs that she decided to withdraw from partnership with Webster and did so publicly. Her letter to the chancellor of the university was released, stirring up the Madison media and rippling across several states.
I am also troubled by our university’s Animal Care and Use Committee that apparently determined that Dr. Webster’s research was ethical. The committee surely had knowledge of the availability of human data, autopsy reports of humans killed by Tasers, and even experiments on pigs nearly identical to those proposed by Webster. I believe that the committee is charged to reject research protocols that are not essential or ethical. At a time when alternatives to using animals have never been more sophisticated and desirable, it is extremely puzzling and disturbing that in this case, the ACUC chose to increase, rather than decrease, the number of research studies using animals on the University of Wisconsin Campus. —Professor Terry Young |
She kept things stirred up when she appeared at a campus demo and gave her statement. Controversy continued to swirl.
Dr. Young has received floods of supportive e-mails from PETA members and other groups who have highlighted the Taser experiment on their Web pages. We also released the moving letter from a Taser victim's sister, who also opposes the experiments.
IIn June 2004, my brother Robert Bagnell became the seventh Canadian to die after being shot with a Taser by police in Vancouver, British Columbia. Robert was unarmed and was posing no credible threat to police or anyone else. He was 44 years old. Since my brother's death, I have been relentlessly trying to make a difference on behalf of those who have so needlessly died, in hopes of preventing further Taser-related deaths . . . I find it especially troublesome that Professor Webster has already made it quite clear—publicly—that he will find nothing wrong with Tasers and merely intends to prove his hypothesis. Shocking more pigs is only going to add their numbers to the Taser-related death statistics. I do not believe that any more animals of any kind should be hurt and/or killed to justify the further use of these potentially deadly weapons and to advance Taser International's financial interests and dubious claims of safety. —Patti Gilman, Vancouver, Canada |
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