Editor,
Recent revelations that UNM scientists tortured mice in a laboratory have caused an outcry from local animal rights groups. The torture techniques should continue - not necessarily for research and educational benefits - because it serves as a reminder that our government tortures humans, and also because torture is in line with the thought and practice of UNM leadership.
UNM experimenters administered electric shocks to mice, subjected them to situations of intense fear and submerged them in water almost to the point of drowning them. According to military investigations, congressional hearings and reports from human rights groups, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies routinely employ interrogation techniques that involve administering electric shocks, beatings, psychological and climactic violence, sensory deprivation and asphyxiation, Waterboarding - whereby U.S. security personnel bind prisoners straight to an inclined board with their feet raised, wrap their head in plastic and pour water over them until they gag and believe they are being suffocated to death - bears remarkable similarity to UNM researchers fixing mice by their tail and sinking them in water to the brink of fatality.
Although President Bush signed into law a prohibition on torture, he immediately issued a signing statement that stated his executive interpretation of the law construed that the torture ban could be flouted under his order. UNM should continue to torture mice to remind people of both the types of torture the U.S. government carries out on human detainees and the fact that the president breaks the law with congressional impunity.
UNM should also continue animal torture because such practice is consistent with the activities its leaders engage in. Louis Caldera was awarded the UNM presidency after serving as secretary to the Army, a post in which he oversaw the School of the Americas. This U.S. military institute trained many of the foreign military and police officers who later systematically tortured their own citizens in Central and South America.
UNM President David Schmidly, an acclaimed zoologist, published a paper in the Journal of Mammalogy in 1987 on research in which rodent penises were "removed from freshly killed specimens." Surely, these research methods complied with ethical guidelines for biology scholarship, but the same animal rights groups that complain about current UNM mouse torture might argue that sanctioned field collection and killing of rodents inflict similar trauma and distress.
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The point is that torture techniques and similarly hurtful, if socially acceptable, acts are a pervasive part of the UNM community and the leaders it chooses. UNM scientists should continue to torture animals because to prohibit mistreatment would be exercising selective ethical concern. We should be consistent in our moralizing. If our university community does not condone torturing animals, then we should be firm in not hiring administrators that have trained torturers. If we disapprove of animal torture, then we should not elect people to Congress who fail to criminally charge Bush with illegal torture of human beings.
Since human rights are a precondition for animal rights, activists can rescue the mice from agonizing experiments only by first focusing their energies on saving human detainees from the immoral torment unleashed by Bush. As it stands, animal torture should continue at UNM to remind us, as citizens, of our complicity in our government's unchecked use of human torture.
Max Ashbrook Fitzpatrick
UNM student
