New Science Curriculum Aims to Curb 'Animal Rights' Influence
By Marc Morano
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
October 28, 2003

(CNSNews.com) - A new science-based educational curriculum has been launched to help elementary and middle school students appreciate the role of science in their lives and to counter the animal rights-based curriculum known as humane education.

"Misinformation gets skewed into the spin of those types of [humane] curriculums, and all of a sudden, kids become zealots for a cause that they really don't completely understand, and they have never been given the whole picture," M. Sue Benford, executive director of the Ohio Scientific Education & Research Association (OSERA), told CNSNews.com.

OSERA is a member of the national group, States United for Biomedical Research, which currently has educational affiliates in 20 states.

Benford's group is introducing a science-based curriculum for 4th through 8th graders in 42 Ohio schools this fall. The curriculum, which introduces students to scientific topics such as animal laboratory testing, diseases, health, food safety and the development of vaccines.

"A lot of times, kids don't even think that science relates to them. If you ask them what subject in school has absolutely no connection to real life, many of them will say science," Benford said.

The new science-based curriculum comes at a time when "humane education," which advocates say includes compassion for animals, awareness of environmental problems like so-called global warming and overpopulation, as well as non-violence, is expanding into the U.S. public school system.

Seventeen states now mandate aspects of the humane education curriculum, and two charter schools - one already open in Harmony, Fla., and another planned near Sacramento, Calif. - are devoted entirely to teaching the curriculum.

The humane education curriculum's emphasis on animal rights and welfare has prompted the Humane Society of the United States and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to support a new taxpayer-funded Humane Education Learning Charter School, which received approval earlier this month in California's San Juan Unified School District.

The planned charter elementary school in California will encourage students to "examine [their] cultural assumptions regarding the inherent value of different species and nature" and help them to "explore [their] responsibility toward earth and other human and non-human beings," according to the California-based New World Vision Institute, one of the supporters of the school's curriculum.

Benford is eager to challenge the animal rights aspects of humane education.

"There is a difference between us and them. We do not believe that animals have the same rights as humans," Benford said.

OSERA's curriculum advocates for animal laboratory testing and opposes animal rights, placing it at odds with much of what humane education teaches.

"Kids don't understand when they are contacted by animal rights organizations such as PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) or any of the other groups, for every cause there is an effect," Benford said, referring to what she sees as the great benefits of animal biomedical research.

"They don't understand that if someone goes in and destroys a laboratory where maybe 20 years of research has been underway to cure, let's say, smallpox or anthrax or cancer, somebody may die for that," Benford added.

But PETA fired back and accused Benford's group of "brainwashing kids."

"It's indicative of how desperate the apologists of vivisection have become that they are stooping to this level," said Alka Chandna, manager of PETA's campaign to end animal experimentation.

"They know perfectly well that children have a natural empathy for animals, and they know perfectly well that our message resonates very well with children for that reason," Chandna told CNSNews.com. "These are all things that are motherhood issues, and children understand those things," she added.

Chandna maintains that the benefits of animal medical testing have been greatly exaggerated and accused OSERA of "adding lies to the curriculum and brainwashing kids and obfuscating facts by oversimplifying."

"We are not rats. We are not mice. We are not dogs. We are not cats. We are human beings. We are different," Chandna said.

But Benford disagreed with PETA's contention that animal medical research is unnecessary. "I am one of the oldest childhood cancer survivors, so I learned at a very early age that scientific research and animal research goes into affecting real-life changes," she said.

Benford cited her daughter's 4th grade class as an example of how today's elementary school kids have already been indoctrinated into the animal rights ideology.

When the 4th grade teacher told the class that animals were used in research to produce modern medications, many students in the classroom said, "that's terrible, that's awful," Benford recounted. When the teacher asked, "Can you come up with an alternative - [the students] said, 'yeah, test it on old people,'" Benford said.

The students' reply, Benford said, proves that they lack understanding of the issue. "I think a lot of times, kids are targeted by those [animal rights] groups because they don't have that awareness," she said.


http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.a...T20031028a.html


Personally I think it's a good thing ... teach them both sides of the story and let them figure it out for themselves.

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Well, I'm a little biased when it comes to my medical/scientific background, but the "humane" education is hilarious. It's one thing when animals are used to test shampoo or something trivial however, when animals are used in a humane way (government sanctioned) in order to test drugs that can be life-saving or drastically life-improving, the use of animals is vital. I'd love to see what a PETA or SPCA member would do if a loved one (human) was dying and they learned a potentially life-saving drug had either lost funding or could not be apporved due to insuffecient testing. We can't test new medicines on humans obviously, so animals must fill that niche. Kids should learn not to treat animals in a grossly inhumane matter, however they do need to know that animals can be used in the most humane way of all, and that is to save humans.

wow somebody should make a report entitled the "hippification of ameirca" about this thing. I can't believe 17 states have basically adopted an interest group agenda. IMO this is equivalent to teaching them creationism over evolution in school.

So, I'll just say, I'm for the former one.

Science education should focus on teaching facts not opinions. It's little wonder that our population exhibits such degrees of ignorance when this is the type of education they're receiving. What a complete waste of time. If I had children, they certainly wouldn't be attending public schools as long as this insanity is going on.

Yes, it's good for those future green hippie activists to realize how the world really works before trying to change it. Although I do believe testing products on animals should be reduced to the smallest possible amount.

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Without turning this into an animal testing debate Im going to say one thing.

Its a good thing to be teaching children to be humane and compassionate. I dont honestly see why anyone would be against that? From the sound of that article it doesnt sound like anyone is being lied to or brainwashed.

And if you think all children are learning is facts I think you are sadly mistaken. Judging on how the people I have talked to have said they were taught history, I can't really see how that argument can be made.

And as far as the remark of the hippification of America, thats just an incredibly stupid stereotype.

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I'm with adagnitio. So long as the material being taught is "accurate", I see nothing wrong with instilling consciensciousness and compassion into the mind-set of younger people. I'd certainly rather leave behind a generation of over-sentimental hippies than a generation of neo-rightist eco-biggots.

This sort of attitude (ennunciated fairly subtly) sickens me:

quote:

"There is a difference between us and them. We do not believe that animals have the same rights as humans," Benford said. [...] "We are not rats. We are not mice. We are not dogs. We are not cats. We are human beings. We are different," Chandna said.

It essentially suggests that merely because animals are less intelligent than us, that their ability to feel pain must necessarily be far lower than our own and that they are not - therefore - deserving of comparable rights. In a sense this view is self-voiding anyway: if these animals are so different from us that we imagine their pain threshold is so radically different from ours that they are not deserving of the same rights, then why are we bothering to test on these animals to begin with? Either they are similar enough to deserve similar rights or they are too different to allow for any meaningful trans-species comparisons - in the form of lab-testing - to work. Which is it?

We must be aware of the fact that we are not the lords and masters of this planet, free to do as we wish with it. The value of non-human life is not determined solely by its utility to the human species.

So I guess, given these views, I strongly oppose vivsection then? Hardly. In English class, back at school a few years ago, we had to write a short opinion piece on vivisection. In a class of 20 or so I was literally the only one who argued in favour it, under the general theme: "if you've got a better alternative, I'd like to hear it". Hopefully at some point in the future there will be a method of testing that doesn't necessitate the use of lab-animals, but until this point, vivisection, as I see it, is a necessary evil. Nonetheless, so long as we are using animals in testing, we need to be quite specific in the sort of testing that is being done and we need to be quite sure that the animals being tested upon are still entitled "basic rights" (i.e. they should be fed properly, sheltered in sanitary conditions and be put out of their misery as soon as possible once it becomes clear they are experiencing extreme pain/irreversibly adverse effects from whatever it is they are being tested with). All it comes down to, really, is limiting the pain inflicted on these animals to a bear minimum.

On the point of being "specific in the sort of testing that is being done" I would say that there are valid reasons to employ animal testing and invalid reasons. Valid reasons would include, among other things, research into curing diseases and ascertaining the safety of potentially dangerous food and drug products released onto the general market. Invalid reasons would be testing of the more frivolous variety, such as experimentation for the sake of experimentation ("I wonder what would happen if we injected half a litre of washing detergent into a rhesus monkey?") and cosmetics testing which, for me, is indicitive of the narcissistic depths the human race is capable of stooping to. That we should feel comfortable inflicting unimaginable pain on feeling animals merely so we can walk around feeling "pretty" strikes me as morally perverse, in every sense of the phrase.

Anyway, I'm not sure if that was on topic or not (was it? ) but that's my two cents for the whole world to see.

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But what is wrong with teaching the children the facts of animal testing having correlation with scientific/medical progress? Personally, I don't think the objective is to dissuade kids from having compassion for animals, I think it's a campaign to provide kids with a more balanced perspective on the whole idea of animal rights testing. Right now, you see cases where PETA is actively targeting kids while they're young in an effort to sway them early on.

http://www.kfoxtv.com/news/2589715/detail.html

So personally I see nothing wrong with this education as long as the facts are taught.

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quote:

Originally posted by occrider So personally I see nothing wrong with this education as long as the facts are taught.

Agreed. But then, the logistics of medical science are fairly complex - surely you can't expect younger children to appreciate or comprehend them? Regardless of how you try to justify the merits of vivisection to them, as soon as you explain that fluffy little animals are being hurt in the process, then their primordial sense of empathy is naturally going to kick in. With or without PETA having an influence over proceedings, the result is going to be the same as soon as the nature of vivisection is expained. As that PETA person put it:

quote:

"They know perfectly well that children have a natural empathy for animals, and they know perfectly well that our message resonates very well with children for that reason."

Besides, I don't see any evidence (in the above article at least) of "lies" being told, merely the attempt to put a "positive spin" on the concept of animal rights. Weren't you the one who advocated the attempts of an interest groups to introduce a "positive spin" to the US history being taught in schools, mainly by spending less time concentrating on the "bad things"? Is that merely "positive spin" or an obstruction of facts? Is it any different in nature to this PETA issue?

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This is a little off-topic, but for my 3rd year physiology course, we had to kill live frogs so we can play around with their muscles. Basically, we took a pith, (kidna like a small icepick) rammed it into their brain and wiggled it around to destroy it, cut off half the head, and jammed the pith down their spine to destroy the nerves.

Well, I couldn't do it, so another guy in my group did, but when he stuck the pith in the frog's brain and moved it around, he didn't do it accurately enough, and the frog was still alive. He just stood there saying "omg, its still alive... omg .." then the TA had to come over and finish the job. Same thing happened with the bullfrogs we pithed a few weeks later.

What bugs me about this is that this isn't really animal "research" since we're not discovering anything new. All we've learned in this lab can easily be learned from a text-book. I really don't see the point in having to take a life just to demonstrate what other scientists already know. But this is what they have us do in school, and it might be a good thing to start moving away from this practice.

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quote:

Originally posted by Renegade Agreed. But then, the logistics of medical science are fairly complex - surely you can't expect younger children to appreciate or comprehend them? Regardless of how you try to justify the merits of vivisection to them, as soon as you explain that fluffy little animals are being hurt in the process, then their primordial sense of empathy is naturally going to kick in. With or without PETA having an influence over proceedings, the result is going to be the same as soon as the nature of vivisection is expained. As that PETA person put it:

Well the courses are designed to examine the fields that benefit from animal testing:

quote:

The curriculum, which introduces students to scientific topics such as animal laboratory testing, diseases, health, food safety and the development of vaccines. "A lot of times, kids don't even think that science relates to them. If you ask them what subject in school has absolutely no connection to real life, many of them will say science," Benford said.

As the article stated, most kids probably fail to realise the role of animal testing and the benefits they yield in society. Perhaps most children form misconceptions that all animal testing really is is to put shampoo in their eyes to study its effects. The new courses are designed to provide them with additional perspective.

quote:

Besides, I don't see any evidence (in the above article at least) of "lies" being told, merely the attempt to put a "positive spin" on the concept of animal rights. Weren't you the one who advocated the attempts of an interest groups to introduce a "positive spin" to the US history being taught in schools, mainly by spending less time concentrating on the "bad things"? Is that merely "positive spin" or an obstruction of facts? Is it any different in nature to this PETA issue?

You misunderstand. I'm not arguing against humane courses as Arbiter is. I'm arguing for science based curriculums to teach kids the benefits/necessity(?) of testing. The humane courses are already in place. Why not provide children with a more rounded perspective by introducing these additional science based courses? Therefore this is exactly like the US history issue. I'm not arguing against teaching kids about the bad parts of US history or the bad parts of animal testing, I'm arguing for teaching kids BOTH sides of the story.

Edit: Although in retrospect, looking at the title of my thread, I can see where you got the impression that I was antagonistic, one way or the other. I actually did not mean it in that way ... although if I had to choose one over the other I would honestly have to pick the former.

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Last edited by occrider on Oct-30-2003 at 17:35

although I really dont want this to turn into a pro/anti animal testing debate I would like to point out that a lot of people legitimately believe that 99.9 % if not all animal testing is not needed or necessary.

I would also just like to say that was this 200 years ago noone would have had any problems testing on blacks, or people of other nationalities. At that point they were not people and had no rights not to be tested on. At this point now we make the same argument for animals, but it is quite concievable that in the future this will not be held to be true. And regardless of necessity I dont think anyone here would aruge that its reasonable to test drugs on someone who is black, or asian or any other minority.

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