Martinez and Sneak Sales of Pets to Labs

Iam not “crazy-eyed.” I am not about to “foam at the mouth” or call Al Martinez and “scream invectives at him.” I am, however, a zealot when it comes to animal rights and was incensed by “Dog and Man.”

Martinez displays the ignorance and lack of compassion that animal-rights activists confront daily. “Scruffy” or otherwise, Last Chance for Animals and groups of a like nature are attempting to change a serious state of affairs.

Martinez feels the issues dealt with by Last Chance lack the “quality of cause” that motivated activists of the 1960s. The issues have not changed much; the outcry is against a greedy, self-indulgent society that runs roughshod over everything in its way, be it fellow man, animal-kind or the environment.

Barbaric acts against the most trusting of all animals is not funny. Picture a beagle, burned by lab technicians over three-fourths of its body, left without anesthetic in a wire cage without food or water. It’s not funny. Picture a family in Vietnam taking a trusting, very much alive, dog on a picnic, playing with it until lunchtime, hanging it from a tree to die and burning its fur from its body with a torch in preparation for the barbecue pit. It happens and there is nothing funny about it.

Total eradication of the use of animals for research is unlikely; changes in the ways in which they are used are not. The only way to end the needless suffering of lab animals is to educate people as to the extent of it.

Al Martinez and those like him that make light of such gruesome practices only help to ease the conscience of those who are unaware of, or choose not to believe, what so many creatures, including many family pets, are forced to endure. I would like to see someone at The Los Angeles Times do an expose on pit bull rings, puppy mills or factory farming or make an unannounced visit to a research lab. For all the fluff printed that denounces animal-rights issues as silly, I have never seen the other side printed; and on the subject of noise, Al, take your own advice and give that rabbit-behavior idea a thought.

NADIA DICKINSON

Lancaster