In my last post on The Lucky Puppy coloring workbook produced by a U.S. government affiliate to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), I described the recent propaganda piece promoting animal experimentation directed at young children. I’ve been thinking about this disturbing behavior in the scientific establishment all day, and felt compelled to share another government, taxpayer-produced piece of pro-vivisection propaganda created for young children.

This time it’s a poster, titled “Let’s Visit a Research Laboratory.” Made for elementary school classrooms, and provided free of charge, the poster displays a lab like a doll house, with all the rooms open to the viewer, labeled, and with details about each room on the bottom. There are only two species of animals at this lab – monkeys and mice. The mice live in “rodent housing,” and each smiling mouse has a name on his or her cage (Lola, Eddie, Lana, Elf, Fuzzy, and Sam among others). The monkeys live together in spacious indoor/outdoor cages, play on tire swings and with brightly colored beach balls. In the “testing lab” one finds a smiling monkey happily playing on a computer. There’s one sad monkey, representing the only unhappy animal in the poster. This monkey is in the “treatment room,” and if you read the description you learn, “Most laboratories have a room just like a doctor’s office to care for animals if they become ill or get injured. Just like kids, monkeys can play rough and sometimes bite one another. They need treatment for cuts and scrapes.”

So what do little children learn from this free educational poster provided to their schools with our tax dollars? They learn:

• That laboratories name their animal friends who enjoy their happy lab life, when in fact animals are numbered, called “subjects,” and are killed at the end of the experiments.
• That “testing” is game playing, rather than being force fed drugs, cosmetics, household products and other chemicals.
• That monkeys are spaciously housed together and provided with lots of toys and enrichment, when most are in small, isolated indoor cages, with little or nothing to play with.
• That the only reason to “treat” an animal is because she or he has been hurt by other animals, rather than burned, shocked, cut open, or drugged by those who conduct research on them.

This particular poster is long out of print, but I still use it to train humane educators and as a critical thinking tool in schools. I had hoped that our tax dollars were no longer being spent on this absurd level of propaganda, but The Lucky Puppy, just published this past fall, proved me wrong. So, lest you think that The Lucky Puppy is an aberration, now you know that it follows a long trend of child-directed propaganda.

It’s crucial that humane education spread; that teachers bring critical thinking to students in age-appropriate ways; that we engage in citizenship to reject the cynical and manipulative use of our tax dollars; and that we commit to educating for a humane and sustainable world.

I consider these pro-vivisection propaganda publications as opportunities to engage in vigorous debate and even more rigorous humane education. I hope you do too.

~ Zoe

Filed under: accurate information, critical thinking, humane education, propaganda Tagged: | accurate information, animal experimentation, animal testing, bias, biomedical research, critical thinking, humane education, indoctrination, marketing to young children, propaganda, U.S. government, vivisection