by Ingrid Newkirk
Knight Ridder-Tribune
In mid-January, a dog belonging to Christine Todd Whitman, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, died of cancer. Only days before she died, Whitman's dog, named Coors, had become the "poster dog" of an advertisement prominently displayed at the Metro subway stop nearest to the EPA's headquarters in Washington.
The graphic advertisement, paid for by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals showed a dog with her head in what is called a stereotaxic device, a metal frame used to keep the head rigid while the dog is being experimented upon. The title pulled no punches. "If you think EPA animal tests are fine, why not let your dog, Coors, be poisoned in one?"
PETA withdrew the ads as soon as Whitman alerted the organization about Coors' death.
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The issue over the EPA's use of animals in crude environmental toxin tests remains alive and the debate is lively. The irony of how Coors died is not lost on the campaigners who want to get Whitman to extend her consideration for animals to those in the labs she oversees in her role as EPA chief. While Coors died in the arms of those who cared for and loved her and all efforts were made to relieve her pain, millions of animals deliberately poisoned in EPA laboratories were not as lucky. They spent their final days and hours alone in a small, barren metal cages, writhing in unrelieved agony.
Perhaps as great a sin is that they suffered for nothing. Despite mountains of test data, the EPA has not removed a single toxic industrial chemical from the market in more than 10 years and, if anything, enforcement of any regulations that might have a negative effect on industry are just not in the cards.
I wrote a letter to Whitman two days after Coors' death, appealing to her to use this time of sadness at the loss of a member of the family to consider that the EPA could spare countless people and animals pain and premature death from cancers linked to environmental toxins if it did its job -- the job spelled out in the congressional mandate that accompanied its creation.
Today, the EPA is a sham. Its crude animal tests are as far from 21st century state-of-the-art technology as the toboggan is from a Boeing 777. Just as tobacco-industry experiments were used to try to disprove the harmful effects of nicotine, tar and tobacco -- that is, to confound and confuse, rather than clarify the effects of various substances on human beings, the Earth and wildlife -- so too the EPA seems to fiddle happily away in its poison palaces and basement laboratories while Rome burns.
Year after year, PETA's scientist advisers sit down at the table with EPA officials and meet with obstinacy, ignorance and indifference to the suffering of animals and the steps that need to be taken to replace their use in these unsatisfactory, painful tests with modern, humane test methods. Two years ago, the U.S. Congress ordered the agency Whitman heads to spend money on alternatives to animal use, to modernize, but it has not done so.
