Data published by the British government the week
of July 21, 2002 show that Britain inflicts painful and lethal
experiments on up to 3 million animals every year. Eleven percent
of these animals are fish or birds. While the total number of
animals recorded fell 3.4 percent from 2000, experiments using
genetically modified animals rose by 49,000, to 631,000 recorded
animals in 2001 (Kelland).
For example, the third largest
broiler chicken breeding company in the world, Hubbard/ISA, is
now owned by Merial, which is a joint venture between the pharmaceutical
companies Merck and Aventis, who also own British United Turkeys
Limited and extend internationally from the U.S. to China (Hubbard Farms 1995; and Paul
Aho, email to Karen Davis, July 30, 2002).
These four companies (groups of
companies) are Aviagen, which owns about 44 percent of the global
market; Cobb-Vantress, owned by Tyson Foods, which owns 33 percent;
Hubbard/ISA, which owns about 10 percent; and Hybro, which owns
5 percent of the world market share of broiler chicken breeding
stock (Aho, p. 36).
NPR never mentions in
the broadcast or in the written transcript that “philosopher”
Paul Thompson represents agribusiness as director of Purdue University’s
Center for Food Animal Productivity and Well-Being.
Dr. Josef Mengele experimented
on human beings at Auschwitz. See Patterson, p. 47: “A
prison doctor at Auschwitz, Magda V., said that Josef Mengele treated Jews ‘like laboratory animals’
since ‘we were really biologically inferior in his eyes.’ Whenever
he exploded with anger at prisoner doctors, Mengele called them
‘dogs and pigs.’ ”
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