Medical Research and Animal Rights

Well, there’s good news indeed when we learn (on Page 1, no less) that the medical establishment is finally on the defensive concerning animal use in experiments and testing (“Medical Field Defends Use of Animals in Lab,” April 22). Thank you, People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, the Animal Liberation Front, Transpecies Unlimited, Last Chance for Animals, the Culture and Animals Foundation and many, many more for having at last made visible to the general public, and to the media, the abomination of animal experimentation: its abuses, its ghastliness, its waste and cost in our tax dollars, in lives--both animal and human--its duplication of painful experiments because there is no centralized documentation of these tests, the pathetic lack of laws and regulations concerning the welfare of laboratory animals and, most importantly, the ethical and moral issues at the heart of the debate.

More power to these heroic people, and may we win total abolition before too many billions of innocent creatures perish horribly in our hands.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL

Los Angeles