Medical Research - The Story of Malish the Tormented Macaque
A Shooting Ourselves in the Foot: The Sanitizing of Violence in Our Society Article from All-Creatures.org

Throughout the ages, we have accepted killing, violence, and violent behavior as just being a part of life - it's time we change!

By: Frank L. Hoffman

If Mary had not worked in medical research while we were in college, perhaps we may have doubted some of the horror stories we encountered later, such as this one concerning Malish, a macaque monkey.  Mary left medical research because, as she perceived it from personal experience, it was nothing but sanitized sadism, producing little or no meaningful results.  It was simply a way of funding for the professors.   The following news report and photos are further confirmation that medical research has not changed in the forty-two years since Mary left medical research work.

Sunday, November 18th, 2001
By Tamar Nahari, Walla News Service (translated from Hebrew)

A primate experiment conducted at the Hebrew University laboratories in Jerusalem, which was documented undercover, exposes some horrific pictures to watch: in the course of the experiment, electrodes are inserted into a monkey's brain while he is in full consciousness.

The footage was exposed today in the national television news program "Five with Oshrat Kotler" on Channel 2. The experiment exposed took place several months ago, and its documentation with a hidden camera is considered to be one of the only full documentations of similar experiments around the world.

In the footage, the researchers are seen as they are sawing the monkey's skull and inserting electrodes into the brain, for the purpose of conducting an experiment testing the memory activity in the brain. During this surgery, the monkey is conscious and blinking his eyes, while his head is locked into a restraining device. After the surgery the monkey was transferred into a cramped cage where he lived for several months, during which he was deprived of drinking water. In order to drink, the monkey had to prove his visual memory capabilities in various experiments conducted in the months following the surgery.

The monkey seen in the footage is called "Malish". Malish is a two year old long-tail macaque monkey and was raised in the Mazor (BFC) primate breeding farm in Israel, which exports monkeys for experiments.  During the experiment, one of the researchers was recorded talking about the experiment and saying that "we did all kinds of nonsense, simply so we can do something", while explaining that the experiment was actually not documented properly because of a failure in the laboratories' data base system.

Our thanks to Allied Effort to Save Other Primates (Aesop - Project) for the news release and photos.

The researcher's comment, "we did all kinds of nonsense, simply so we can do something" is the exact impression that Mary had of experimentation on other animals during her years in research.  This is not only an Israeli problem, this is a world-wide problem of waste and suffering.

The medical community has known for years that diet and lifestyle account for more than 90% of all chronic disease problems, which means that they are preventable.  We learned this from human beings, and not through animal torment.  Animal experimentation, for the most part, does not seek to prevent disease, but only "seeks" to find ways to treat those preventable illnesses so that people can continue to live in their decadence.  Why is this the case?  Because there is no money in prevention!  There is money to be made only in treating our diseases.   Thus, we believe, that most medical research is doing violence to humans, too.

As we harden our hearts to do violence to animals, we also do violence to people.   In essence, we are shooting ourselves in the foot by sanitizing violence in our society.  We strongly believe that until we stop doing violence to animals, we will never have true peace or good health.

See: Our Readers' Comments
Go on to: PLAGUE UPON DEPRAVITY: An Overview
Return to: Shooting Ourselves in the Foot