Monumental patience

By H. Holden Thorp

Next week marks the 60th anniversary of Jane Goodall's arrival in what is now Tanzania's Gombe National Park to study wild chimpanzees.* Although her story is a familiar one to many scientists, it has taken on a new importance in this era when climate change, racism, and a rapidly spreading coronavirus ravage the globe. It is a story of genuine scientific curiosity, determination, and respect for nature and humanity—all the things we desperately need now.

I talked with Dr. Goodall, virtually, where she was spending her self-isolation in her childhood home in Bournemouth, England.† It is the familiar place where she spent her early years climbing trees and observing her dog, Rusty. She told me the well-known story of how she met paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey and convinced him that she should study wild animals in Africa. She was happy to tell the story one more time. “Some people get it wrong, even now,” she said.

Leakey famously said that Goodall was a person of monumental patience. “There's definitely still lots of opportunity for the old way of watching and recording and being patient,” she said. Goodall still insists that some observational work be done with handwritten note taking, but she also embraces the use of technology. “I believe that you cannot do everything digitally,” she said. “We did graduate to using [tape] recorders, which of course made the transcription extremely laborious because when you are recording, you have caught far more than you could write.” The important thing to Goodall was to get close and study the personalities and interactions among chimpanzee family members. She has been doing it for 60 years, saying “it yielded so much richness.”

The science that started in Gombe back then has evolved, changing and developing as it grows. In partnership with the Jane Goodall Institute (founded in 1977), Crickette Sanz, professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, has continued to build our understanding of chimpanzee tool use. Sanz told me that when her work began in the Republic of the Congo, Goodall traveled several days by plane, truck, and boat, and 20 km on foot to visit the research site and show her support. She says that “the world is yearning for [Goodall's] ideals of hope, compassion, and change.”

And that is where Goodall devotes most of her time now. Although the science is still important—over 300 research papers have now emerged from groups working in Gombe—Goodall lights up when she talks about her new efforts to build respect and hope for the future of humanity and the natural world. The Lake Tanganyika Catchment Reforestation and Education (TACARE) program seeks to use satellite imaging, mobile, and other technologies to ensure that local communities develop their own land-use management solutions and are included as partners in the overall scientific and conservation efforts conducted there.

Another program she devotes most of her time to now, Roots & Shoots, reflects her faith in young people and the future. She still has many concerns about the world. “How do we move into a new green economy?” she wonders. “How do we alleviate poverty so people can make the right choices and stop destroying the environment? How do we realize that putting the short-term economic gain over and above protection of nature is going to be the end of our species as well as the end of most life as we know it?”

In an effort to answer these questions, she uses her platform, and her story, to inspire the younger generation, just as she has also inspired the established scientists of today. To Goodall, “every individual makes a difference,” says Sanz, who sees Goodall as “a steward for nature, with equal concern for the smallest creatures to the largest remaining tracts of intact forest, and gifted in sharing all of its wonders. Through her global presence, she's also emphasized the connectedness of all people and our responsibility to each other. From what I have witnessed, both her compassion and her impact are truly limitless.”

And so is Goodall's empathy. “When you're empathetic,” she says, “you're watching something you don't understand and you get that ‘aha’ moment because you understand them, and then you have a platform as a scientist to find out if your ‘aha’ moment is actually correct. Without the empathy you'd never get there.”

 

Science  10 Jul 2020:

Vol. 369, Issue 6500, pp. 121

USA Today had egg on its face after running a “fact check” story verifying the theory that a Trump campaign T-shirt depicts a Nazi symbol. After causing outrage, it clarified that the bald eagle is a “longtime US symbol too.”

“The claim: Trump campaign shirts feature imperial eagle, a Nazi symbol,” USA Today tweeted on Saturday. “Our ruling: true.”

The similarities between the images boils down to the use of an eagle with its wings raised. Beyond that, critics could not find enough evidence to view USA Today’s piece as anything more than an anti-Trump puff piece.

“Worth noting!” Spectator USA contributor Stephen Miller tweeted in reaction. 

“I’m sorry, what?” Noah Blum added. 

Others trolled the paper on Twitter with images of eagles displayed by other US lawmakers, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California).

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/494550-usa-today-trump-t-shirt-imperial-eagle/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and of course Gus:

 

Read from top.

Meanwhile, the US are doing a sterling job at hating the Russians...

 

see also:

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33068

 

And in regard to Pavlov's dog in cartoon at top, see Bitzer:

https://shaunthesheep.fandom.com/wiki/Bitzer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuyCD-iHe30

 

To Protect Fauci, The Washington Post is Preparing a Hit Piece on the Group Denouncing Gruesome Dog ExperimentationsFor years, the White Coat Waste Project was heralded by The Post as what they are: an activist success story uniting right and left. But now its work imperils a liberal icon.

 

By Glenn Greenwald

 

Anger over the U.S. Government's gruesome, medically worthless experimentation on adult dogs and puppies has grown rapidly over the last two months. A truly bipartisan coalition in Congress has emerged to demand more information about these experiments and denounce the use of taxpayer funds to enable them. On October 24, twenty-four House members — nine Democrats and fifteen Republicans, led by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) — wrote a scathing letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci expressing “grave concerns about reports of costly, cruel, and unnecessary taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs commissioned by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases." Similar protests came in the Senate from a group led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).

The campaign to end these indescribably cruel, taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs has been underway for years, long before Dr. Facui became a political lightning rod. In 2018, I reported on these experiments under the headline "BRED TO SUFFER: Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation.” That article described “a largely hidden, poorly regulated, and highly profitable industry in the United States that has a gruesome function: breeding dogs for the sole purpose of often torturous experimentation, after which the dogs are killed because they are no longer of use.” 

Along with the videographer Leighton Woodhouse, I also produced a two-minute video report which used footage from experimentation labs filmed by activists with the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) to show the graphic, excruciating horrors to which these dogs are subjected (the video, which is hard to watch, is appended to the bottom of this article). In our reporting, we noted the cruel irony driving how and why particular dogs are selected for this short life of suffering and misery and detailed just some of the barbarism involved:

The majority of dogs bred and sold for experimentation are beagles, which are considered ideal because of their docile, human-trusting personality. In other words, the very traits that have made them such loving and loyal companions to humans are the ones that humans exploit to best manipulate them in labs. . . . 

They are often purposely starved or put into a state of severe thirst to induce behavior they would otherwise not engage in. They are frequently bred deliberately to have crippling, excruciating diseases, or sometimes are brought into life just to have their organs, eyes, and other body parts removed and studied as puppies, and then quickly killed.

They are force-fed laundry detergents, pesticides, and industrial chemicals to the point of continuous vomiting and death. They are injected with lethal pathogens such as salmonella or rabies. They have artificial sweetener injected into their veins that causes the dogs’ testicles to shrink before they are killed and exsanguinated. Holes are drilled into their skulls so that viruses can be injected into their brains. And all of that is perfectly legal.

Most of these dogs, after being bred, are "devocalized,” which the advocacy group NAVS describes as “a surgical procedure which makes it physically impossible for the dog to bark.” Though entailing pain and suffering, the procedure prevents the dogs from screaming in pain. As we noted in that article, researchers acknowledge that few to none of these experiments are actually medically necessary. This 2016 op-ed in The San Diego Union-Tribune by Lawrence Hansen, a professor of neuroscience and pathology at the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine who once engaged in experimentation on dogs, explains why he is so ashamed to have participated given their medical worthlessness.

While numerous advocacy groups have been working for years to curb the abuses of these experiments, one group, White Coat Waste Project, has found particular success as a result of an innovative strategy. Advocacy groups know how polarized American politics has become, and that, as a result, a prerequisite for success is constructing a movement that can attract people from all ideologies, who identify with either or neither of the two political parties, but unite in defense of universally held values and principles. 

White Coat has accomplished this with great success by fusing the cause of animal rights (long viewed as associated with the left) with opposition to wasteful taxpayer spending (a cause that resonates more on the right). The fact that love for dogs, and animals generally, has grown across all demographic groups further enables them to unite people from across the spectrum, including in Congress, in support of their cause. They routinely attract both Democratic and Republican members of Congress to sign on to their campaigns to end taxpayer-funded experimentation on animals, and are funded almost entirely through small-donor, grass-roots support that comes from the right, the left, and everything in between. Each year, they publicly award members of Congress “who have demonstrated outstanding leadership in the War on Waste, by exposing and stopping $20 billion in wasteful and unnecessary taxpayer-funded animal experiments,” and those honored are always a bipartisan group of lawmakers.

More than any other group, it is White Coat that has elevated the cause of stopping these horrific government experimentations on dogs and puppies into the mainstream political conversation. And numerous media outlets — led by The Washington Post — have spent years publishing flattering profiles on this group and its innovative bipartisan strategies. In November, 2016, for instance, The Post published reporting about White Coat's activities — under the headline: “Should dogs be guinea pigs in government research? A bipartisan groupsays no” — which heralded the group and its activists for being one of those rare Washington success stories that unites both left and right around a common cause:

 

(see screenshot)

 

That Post article detailed how White Coat was a group that had drawn from both Republican and Democratic political circles, and had deliberately formulated its messaging and goals to appeal to all sides of the political divide:

It’s no accident that the Congress members hosting the event are a bipartisan pair. White Coat Waste emphasizes that it is not a traditional animal advocacy organization, but one focused on what it says is government waste on testing — the kind of issue that could appeal to both fiscal conservatives and animal rights activists. Its founder, Anthony Bellotti, is a Republican strategist whose LinkedIn profile lists experience managing campaigns against Obamacare and federal funding for Planned Parenthood. [Vice President Justin] Goodman formerly worked for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

“We oppose taxpayer funding of animal experimentation. That’s it,” Bellotti said. “We don’t take a position on cosmetics testing any more than we do on vegan nutrition”. . . . In 2014, a Pew survey found that 50 percent of Americans oppose the use of animals in scientific research, with Democrats and political liberals slightly more opposed than Republicans and conservatives.

“Finding effective ways to limit unnecessary and expensive animal tests is good for taxpayers and is good for our animals,” [Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA)} said in a statement sent to The Washington Post. “As a member of the Appropriations Committee that funds these agencies, I certainly welcome more analysis on what federal agencies are doing in terms of testing on dogs and other animals. I look forward to collaborating with a bipartisan group of my colleagues in Congress to address this problem.”

Throughout the Trump years, The Post continued to report on the group's work in flattering ways, always emphasizing its purely non-partisan agenda and their ability to bring together left and right. Though The Post once referred to them as “a right-leaning advocacy group,” White Coat has been described by the paper for years as an animal rights group uniting all camps by combating the use of taxpayer dollars for experiments most would find morally reprehensible. After all, during the Trump years, they were protesting experimentations done by agencies controlled by the Trump administration, so heralding their work aligned perfectly with The Post's political agenda of flattering the views of their liberal readers. 

One 2018 Post article on White Coat described how “a nonprofit animal rights organization filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against the U.S. Agriculture Department, seeking information about experiments during which thousands of cats have been euthanized at a facility in Maryland.” A 2020 Post article described White Coat as “a small watchdog group that has generated bipartisan congressional opposition to [the Veteran Administration's] dog research by arguing that federal animal testing is a waste of taxpayer dollars.” A 2018 Post article on a similar campaign simply described it as “an animal rights group.” A 2017 Post article described White Coat's success in recruiting renowned British primatologist Jane Goodall to the cause of stopping cruel FDA experiments on primates, calling it “an advocacy group that says its goal is to publicize and end taxpayer-funded animal experiments.” 

So The Post, like most major media outlets, has been reporting on the successes of the White Coat Waste Project fairly and favorably for years. Most people in Washington and in the media regard success in bridging divisions between the citizenry and ideological camps as a desirable and positive objective, and few groups have done that with as much success as White Coat. And thus, along with trans-ideological public support, the group has been lavished with positive media coverage — until now.

 

 

Now everything has changed. The government official who oversees the agencies conducting most of these gruesome experiments has become a liberal icon and one of the most sacred and protected figures in modern American political history: Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and President Biden's Chief Medical Advisor. Many of the most horrific experiments, including the ones on dogs and puppies now in the news as a result of White Coat's activism, are conducted by agencies under Fauci's command and are funded by budgets he controls.

In other words, White Coat's activism, which had long generated bipartisan support and favorable media coverage, now reflects poorly on Dr. Fauci. And as a result, The Washington Post has decided to amass a team of reporters to attack the group — the same one the paper repeatedly praised prior to the COVID pandemic — in order to falsely smear it as a right-wing extremist group motivated not by a genuine concern for the welfare of animals or wasteful government spending, but rather due to a partisan desire, based in MAGA ideology, to attack Fauci.

In emails sent last week to the group, Post reporter Beth Reinhard advised them that she wanted “to talk about White Coat Waste and the #beaglegate campaign.” She specifically asked for a wide range of financial documents relating to the group's funding — far beyond what non-profit advocacy groups typically disclose. “May I request your 2020 filing with the IRS,” Reinhard first inquired. White Coat quickly provided that. On October 30, White Coat Vice President Justin Goodman provided even more financial documents — “attached are the Schedule Bs. I’ve also attached a breakdown of our funding sources from 2017-Q3 2021,” he wrote in an email to Reinhard — yet nothing satisfied her, because nothing in these documents was remotely incriminating or helpful to the narrative they were trying to concoct about the group's real, secret agenda.

After White Coat voluntarily provided more and more detailed documentation about its finances, it became obvious what fictitious storyline The Post was attempting to manufacture: that this is a far-right group that is funded by "dark money” from big MAGA donors, motivated by a hatred of science and Dr. Fauci. But in trying to manufacture this false tale, The Post encountered a rather significant obstacle: White Coat is funded almost entirely by small donors, grass-roots citizens who use the group's website to make donations.

Once The Post was repeatedly thwarted in its efforts to concoct the lie that the group is MAGA-funded, Reinhard continued to insist that there must be hidden right-wing funding sources, and even began demanding that White Coat take some sort of bizarre vow never to accept right-wing or "pro-Trump" funding sources in the future. On Monday, she sent them this flailing email:

 

(see email)

 

Read more:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/to-protect-fauci-the-washington-post

 

 

 

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