Animal Rights Protesters Picket Home of UCI Professor Using Dogs in Smog Study

Carrying pictures of disfigured monkeys and cats and placards bearing slogans such as “Vivisectors Beware--Your Turn Next,” about 100 people marched Sunday in front of the home of a UC Irvine professor to protest the use of animals in research experiments.

The target of the peaceful, 90-minute demonstration, Robert F. Phalen, a professor of community and environmental medicine, is conducting experiments on beagles to help determine the effects of air pollution.

Last January, people claiming to be members of the Animal Liberation Front broke into the UCI kennels and removed 11 of Phalen’s research subjects and two more dogs being used in other research.

Phalen and his family, who live in unincorporated county territory near Orange, were not home during the protest. Police advised them beforehand to leave for the day “to make their (police officers’) jobs easier,” Phalen said Sunday morning. He spent the day at his laboratory, continuing the research that UCI administrators say is valuable and critics decry as cruelty to animals that is useless to humans.

“I might as well spend the day there,” Phalen said. “They’re taking advantage of the publicity, and they’ve cost us an awful lot of time.”

Sandra Behm, co-director of People for Reason in Science and Medicine, one of several groups involved in the demonstration, said their intention was not just to confront Phalen but also to let his neighbors know about his research and further publicize the activists’ commitment.

“He knows we’re here,” Behm said. “We’re going to keep this up.”

In Phalen’s current research, dogs breathe polluted air through a mask and run on a treadmill. University officials say the dogs can remove the masks and stop running whenever they want, but they seldom do. Some dogs have had tracheostomies so that researchers can sample air pollutants after they have been filtered by the dog’s nasal passages.

The dogs are allowed to live out their lives at the research kennels or are given away when they are no longer useful subjects, Phalen said. In earlier research on the effects of pollution on lung development, Phalen did kill his beagle subjects with a barbiturate injection before examining their lungs, according to a statement issued Sunday by university officials.

The study concluded that air pollution affected lung development but that “the level of harm was unlikely to be severely threatening to the health of children,” the statement said. But Behm said Phalen’s research and others like it are spawned by a “questionable alliance” between big businesses anxious to get their products approved and scientists who depend on grants--in part from the industries whose “toxins” they study--to keep themselves and their staffs working.

The group’s efforts, however, alienated at least one of Phalen’s neighbors.

“My next-door neighbor is a nice guy, and I support him,” said Bill Blundell, standing on the porch of his house and watching the demonstrators file by on the sidewalk along Yorba Street. “I guess they’re trying to make a big deal about it. It’s my neighborhood, and they ought to do it where he works.”

In Phalen’s absence, top UCI administrators were on hand to monitor the demonstration and respond to the charges made by the protesters. (Among the literature passed out by PRISM: a reprint of an article charging that the World Health Organization, infiltrated by communists, conspired to develop the AIDS virus and then intentionally released it upon unsuspecting Africans. It further suggested that the AIDS virus could be passed on a salad plate and advised against patronizing restaurants that hire homosexuals.)

Stuart Krassner, UCI associate vice chancellor for research, stood near an orange tree in Phalen’s back yard and talked of what he called the “anti-intellectual” philosophy of the demonstrators.

“These are the kind of tactics the fascists and the communists used to use, where you attack someone’s family and you don’t worry about the truth . . . because the end justifies the means,” Krassner said.

“If a child dies as a result (of the abolition of experiments on animals), or if a person has cancer or heart disease. . . . That’s what these people want.”