Animals documentary on Channel 4
Rick | 05.01.2006 18:16 | Animal Liberation
'Animals' is a 2 hour part film, part documentary about the radical end of the animal rights movement. It features Jon Curtin and Greg Avery If you missed it being shown on More 4 channel, good news, it is being shown on Channel 4 - January 12th 10pm.
http://www.channel4.com/more4/documentaries/doc-feature.jsp?id=21
http://www.channel4.com/more4/documentaries/doc-feature.jsp?id=21
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Animals
Dec 2005. Rpt Channel 4 12 Jan 2006 10pm
Docu-drama following the fictional stories of a lab biologist and an animal rights activist.
Webchat Mon 12 Dec 11pm, with Dr Simon Festing (head of the Research Defense Society) and John Curtin (animal rights activist). Read the transcript.
Animals is a dramatised account of the conflict between animal rights activists and scientists that escalates into an intensely polarised, vicious and hard-fought battle.
Those trying to stop animal experimentation have been named 'quasi-terrorists' stopping at nothing to achieve their objectives. Those who are engaged in animal research do so under siege: if they haven't been singled out already, they work in secret and under threat.
Are these people pioneering heroes trying to save human life and cure disease, or are they complicit in an animal holocaust where millions of animals suffer terrible pain in the arrogant name of science?
This film follows the fictional stories of laboratory biologist Bob Thornwell, and animal rights activist Samantha McFarland, as their lives intertwine and clash violently.
It is through these principal characters and their radically different perspectives that we see the animal rights debate and the people involved over several turbulent years. The laboratory survives and the testing continues but Thornwell and McFarland pay a heavy price for their beliefs.
Throughout the programme, documentary interviews will look at the broader questions of the debate, informing the human stories of the drama.
John Curtin, an animal rights activist, appears in Animals. Read about John Curtin
Return to Kill or Cure homepage
Dec 2005. Rpt Channel 4 12 Jan 2006 10pm
Docu-drama following the fictional stories of a lab biologist and an animal rights activist.
Webchat Mon 12 Dec 11pm, with Dr Simon Festing (head of the Research Defense Society) and John Curtin (animal rights activist). Read the transcript.
Animals is a dramatised account of the conflict between animal rights activists and scientists that escalates into an intensely polarised, vicious and hard-fought battle.
Those trying to stop animal experimentation have been named 'quasi-terrorists' stopping at nothing to achieve their objectives. Those who are engaged in animal research do so under siege: if they haven't been singled out already, they work in secret and under threat.
Are these people pioneering heroes trying to save human life and cure disease, or are they complicit in an animal holocaust where millions of animals suffer terrible pain in the arrogant name of science?
This film follows the fictional stories of laboratory biologist Bob Thornwell, and animal rights activist Samantha McFarland, as their lives intertwine and clash violently.
It is through these principal characters and their radically different perspectives that we see the animal rights debate and the people involved over several turbulent years. The laboratory survives and the testing continues but Thornwell and McFarland pay a heavy price for their beliefs.
Throughout the programme, documentary interviews will look at the broader questions of the debate, informing the human stories of the drama.
John Curtin, an animal rights activist, appears in Animals. Read about John Curtin
Return to Kill or Cure homepage
Rick
Comments
Hide the following 4 comments
channel 4 were unbaised?
08.01.2006 13:22
Are channel 4 going to jeoperidise their advertising money? of course not.
the usually format the caring humanitarian ''scientist'' verses the human hating animal loving animal rights extremist- all the medical people from as far back as 1825 to today(all documented in books by hans ruesch slaughter of the innocent and naked empress;or the great medical fraud) who have been and are against vivisection because its used to get useless or dangerous drugs,envioronmental toxins,agro-chemicals and torturing practises like chemo and radiation passed as ''SAFE'' thus creating new diseases and perpetuating others.A heathly society is a dead drugs industry.
the usually nobel euphemisms will be used in the truth witholding programme, ''RESEARCH'' and ''SCIENCE'' while diesease and illness becomes more eternal and the white coated disease producing con merchants and their PR department the tv,radio,newpaper media laugh on thus opening more disease markets and more ''RESEARCH'' rackets.
mick
Conflict of interest
09.01.2006 14:51
John Locke
were independant?(u can believe us)
10.01.2006 01:31
Please remember vivisection is a life saving practise and animal rights activists are terrorists they would rather save rats than babies-NOW WHERE DID I GET THAT FROM?
Thom
Real views from Science Communities
13.01.2006 10:28
Example - check this correspondence from New Scientist and the extract from an article by Ray Greek from the ( US ) National Anti-Vivisection Society.
"Come out and talk - 22 October 2005
From New Scientist Print Edition. Adolfo Sansolini London, UK
We agree wholeheartedly with Fiona Fox when she calls for open and honest debate between animal rights protestors and scientists (24 September, p 22). The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection often criticises the government for failing to open a public and unbiased inquiry into the results of animal testing, and for not making any attempt to open the gates of animal testing laboratories to public scrutiny.
However, the animal research community, aided by the UK government, does everything to stifle debate on animal testing by opposing the release of meaningful information about what is done to animals in laboratories, or why it is done to them. They say this is because of fear of violent reprisal but Fox herself says there is no evidence that "speaking out" is the spark for intimidation and attacks.
The Home Office fiercely resists applications from responsible organisations for anonymised information under the Freedom of Information Act. They will only publish very brief summaries of licences, written by the researchers themselves, concealing more than they reveal, and downplaying the suffering involved.
However, in suggesting that such debate only lies between scientists and animal rights "extremists" Fox is out of date. We want an open debate between researchers who use animals and the increasing number of scientists who consider animal experiments as flawed science.
Only three weeks ago, the Financial Times reported on "human micro-dosing", a method that can test "whole body" effects of drugs in humans, bypassing the use of animals. And on 26 September the British Pharmaceutical Conference in Manchester unveiled the microfluidic circuit, a chip containing areas of cells representing different parts of the human body, linked by tiny channels that circulate nutrients between them. It is designed to assess the effects of a potential new drug compound on humans, and gives human-specific data, in contrast to misleading and dangerous animal data that cannot be extrapolated to humans. Surely, it is "new science" like this that New Scientist should be covering.
From Colleen McDuling
Fiona Fox is absolutely correct in saying that scientists should speak out on animal research. The only problem I have with her article is that I am ineligible to participate. According to the article, those taking part in the debate are clearly either animal rights extremists (who oppose animal testing), or scientists (who favour it). What about those of us who are neither? Are they automatically excluded? I happen to be a medical scientist who is opposed to animal research, but I am not an animal rights extremist.
While those scientists who argue for animal experimentation may be lauded by their peers, those who are against it are likely to be persecuted for their stance, if they make their views publicly known. They hide in the background wanting to speak out, but are too afraid to do so. I know full well what it is like to endure this persecution and ridicule. And yet, those of us who are not extremists also have a right to make our voices heard. We are law-abiding, and oppose violence in any form.
There is a powerful scientific, as well as ethical argument, to be made against animal testing. Not only are animals so biologically different from humans such that results from them cannot in any way be extrapolated safely to humans, they are sentient and highly emotional beings with some basic feelings similar to our own. Thus they should be afforded the same respect that we would give to our fellow humans.
I would therefore respectfully ask Fox to acknowledge people such as myself when writing similar articles in the future, lest the general public be left with the notion that all who support animal research must be law-abiding scientists, while all who oppose it are violent extremists
Sevenoaks, Kent, UK
British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection
From issue 2522 of New Scientist magazine, 22 October 2005, page 26"
" I and others (see Brute Science by LaFollette and Shanks Routledge 1996), have said for years that the differences in regulatory genes would far outweigh the similarities in structural genes. Others agree. Again according to New Scientist, "Tim Hubbard, head of genome analysis at the Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, is sceptical about the significance of the 2.5 per cent difference. He thinks that the genes might in fact all be identical and that differences between species might arise solely through divergence in the "regulatory regions" which switch other genes on and off." While we will no doubt read many more stories about the similarities between the genome of human and that of other animals, we should keep in mind that these similarities are meaningless without knowledge of how the structural genes are regulated. To conclude that 98 or 99% similarity means the animal will be a good model for studying human disease and drug reaction exposes an ignorance, willful or otherwise, of basic biology. Ray Greek, MD "
So, the bottom line would appear to be funding ( and ego ).How hard is it for these vivsectionists to say when they are wrongwith theirtesting.Very, I imagine. Check the recent scandal with cloning.Nuff said.
m