Althouse: "We often encountered Professor Yin’s frisky and playful cats, peering curiously around a corner or darting by at top speed or jumping into our laps."

January 29, 2015

"We often encountered Professor Yin’s frisky and playful cats, peering curiously around a corner or darting by at top speed or jumping into our laps."

"Those cats got more attention and care and love than most pets."

From the the UW School of Public Health Department of Neuroscience letter defending the professor who experimented on cats and was reviled by PETA. The full text of the letter appears at the end of my January 25th post titled "PETA's campaign and the intense public pressure it brought to bear on UW-Madison have ended this horrendous laboratory's legacy of cruelty at last." The post title isn't my statement, but a quote from a PETA press release.

(Please note that my use of the tag "animal cruelty" doesn't mean I think there has been cruelty to animals, only that the topic of animal cruelty is under discussion. I could say something similar about many of my tags, most notably "torture.")

17 comments:

Curious George said...: Here would be my letter:

Dear PETA:

Fuck off.

Signed,

Me; 1/29/15, 9:28 AM
Eric the Fruit Bat said...: I like cats.

I probably wouldn't like Professor Yin.; 1/29/15, 9:31 AM
MadisonMan said...: I can't recommend trying to reason with PETA. It's like trying to reason with a toddler.; 1/29/15, 9:34 AM
Kyzer SoSay said...: People
Eating
Tasty
Animals

The only PETA I can stomach . . .; 1/29/15, 9:45 AM
traditionalguy said...: A new War on Cats. Have the Madison researchers let the prisoner cats go free? Now who is going to feed them and shelter them?; 1/29/15, 10:02 AM
Virgil Hilts said...: My wife and I took our kids to a cat circus about 10 years ago. It was amazing. Check out these cats at the 4:30 mark in this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1DtBYeavN4; 1/29/15, 10:06 AM
mccullough said...: Tradguy,

I think the War on Cats is just .part of the global War on Pussy; 1/29/15, 10:17 AM
Smilin' Jack said...: ""We often encountered Professor Yin’s frisky and playful cats, peering curiously around a corner or darting by at top speed or jumping into our laps....Those cats got more attention and care and love than most pets."

From the the UW School of Public Health Department of Neuroscience letter defending the professor who experimented on cats and was reviled by PETA.

Wow, that place sounds like fun. He could have defused the PETA problem by moving on to human subjects and opening a day care center. The neuroscience faculty would be lining up to send their kids there.; 1/29/15, 10:19 AM
Owen said...: Let's not ever do any experiments ever on any living thing. Plants included. Because feelings!

Pond Scum
Empowered
To Resist
Anthropocentricity; 1/29/15, 10:27 AM
Curious George said...: "Virgil Hilts said...
My wife and I took our kids to a cat circus about 10 years ago. It was amazing. Check out these cats at the 4:30 mark in this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1DtBYeavN4"

Ha, and I thought it was cool that my cat played fetch.; 1/29/15, 10:36 AM
kzookitty said...: People are way off on this issue. We're talking cats for goodness sake!
The humans aren't experimenting on the cats. The cats are experimenting on the humans.
kzookitty; 1/29/15, 10:47 AM
Known Unknown said...: Back in middle school, a fellow student and I created SSWA -- Students for the Slaughter of Worthless Animals.

We created "SWAA Bears" which were like the inverse of Care Bears. Each one had a name and likeness. I think one might have been a Nazi or something.

Don't know what happened to any of the art.

It was a dumb joke.; 1/29/15, 10:57 AM
Fernandinande said...: Smilin' Jack said...
Wow, that place sounds like fun. He could have defused the PETA problem by moving on to human subjects and opening a day care center. The neuroscience faculty would be lining up to send their kids there.

That's about what I thought.

It'd be kinda cool if the medical researchers would discover something non-trivial and reproducible. It's approaching "scam" status at this point.; 1/29/15, 11:31 AM
jr565 said...: Did his experiments even hurt cats?; 1/29/15, 11:33 AM
David said...: jr565 said...
Did his experiments even hurt cats?

It deafened them so they could no longer come when they were called.; 1/29/15, 12:20 PM
Fernandinande said...: Eric the Fruit Bat said...
I like cats.
I probably wouldn't like Professor Yin.

Tho not a "cat person", I like animals, and I don't think you'd have to scratch an animal researcher very deeply to uncover a bit of psychopathy.; 1/29/15, 12:43 PM
mikee said...: I was an undergrad Chem major in 1979 when I was recruited by a grad student to assist in a metabolism study of a new product - acetominophen. Student work-study!

Acetominophen liver toxicity was under review, again, and the grad student was force feeding vast amounts of Tylenol to rats, keeping them alive for 24 hours, then analyzing their liver enzymes for damage assessment.

I was enlisted to guillotine the rats, which the grad student bonded with too strongly to kill herself.

The rats were gently held in two hands, swung in large circles until dizzy, then quickly decapitated in a guillotine set up over a sink. Yes, rat guillotines are a commercial product sold in any lab catalog. The rats' livers were removed from their still-warm corpses with scalpels, milled to a fine paste, and taken away by the grad student for enzyme extraction and analysis.

Student work-study. You learn things. I later got to analyze pine needles for uranium content for minimum wage, too.

Cats? Scratchy.; 1/30/15, 10:55 AM