Last spring the Humane Society, a group committed to stopping animal suffering in scientific research, mailed a petition to former Director of Sponsored Research John Carfora to sign on behalf of the College. Carfora looked over the document, signed it, and mailed it back without consulting any members of the administration or faculty. The petition, a simple statement reading: “Amherst College joins others that have pledged to ensure that no laboratory animals in our care experience severe pain or distress,” sounded innocent enough to be treated in this fashion. However, the Humane Society’s objective in getting this petition signed turned out to be much less benign.
According to an article in The Chronicle for Higher Education, the Humane Society had been approaching small colleges, like Amherst, that have either no or very limited animal research on campus, to sign this petition so that they could use these colleges’ support as leverage in their fight to more strictly limit animal research at larger institutions. This petition became news to the College administration this summer when The Chronicle published its article entitled, “New Front in Battle Over Studies of Animals: Activists Take Aim at Nonresearch Colleges.” The article named Amherst as one of the institutions spearheading this movement at the Humane Society’s request, even going so far as to quote Carfora as saying “How could I not sign this and have a conscience?” Immediately after this article hit the presses, the heat turned on. The biology and neuroscience faculty wondered where this possible limit on research had come from and the administration wondered how this petition had slipped its notice.
The Dean of Faculty Gregory Call remarked that this mishap perhaps had to do with “a lack of familiarity with Amherst procedures.” Neuroscience Professor Stephen George added that “Mr. Carfora was obviously well intentioned … but didn’t look into all the implications that the Humane Society was trying to get at.”
The problems of signing this petition were twofold. The first area of concern was that in signing this petition the College had given the Humane Society leverage over the way that the scientific faculty conducts animal research. The neuroscience department, for example, induces stress in animals in order to study medical models of depression, and this petition gives groups such as the Humane Society easy ways to argue against these experiments as they could semantically argue the meaning of “severe” in their petition, explained George.
The second area of concern was that these developments had all occurred without the knowledge or consultation of anyone in the administration or faculty. Protests have been lodged in the past against certain kinds of animal research within a very clear and thought-out process. The College has a committee made up of faculty members, ranging from fields such as neuroscience and biology to those ethics, who, with the consultation of a veterinarian, carefully structure the animal research ethics that the College uses.
In the past two months, the College has responded very quickly to the issues posed by the signing of the petition. First, it revoked the statement and told Carfora to write the Humane Society to make clear that his signing did not represent a decision by the College to support this petition. Secondly, the administration told the Humane Society that if it has a problem with Amherst’s treatment of animals, it should bring its grievance to the College’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.
Having clarified its position on the petition, the College can once again go about a proper discussion of these issues within the framework of a constructive dialogue.