The Great Ape Protection Act, Kurt Schrader, Marxism And Us

From the Humane Society:

Late last week, ABC News: Nightline broke the story of more than 300 chimpanzees languishing at one of the world's largest primate research facilities.

The report featured video footage gathered by The Humane Society of the United States during a nine-month undercover investigation at the New Iberia Research Center in Louisiana -- and showed the routine and possibly unlawful treatment of hundreds of chimpanzees and monkeys.

Each animal's suffering detailed in the report was wrenching, but the story of 26 elder chimps currently warehoused at the facility was particularly poignant.

These 26 chimps were taken from their mothers in the wild, and have since lived a life behind bars. The oldest, Karen, was captured in 1958, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president.

Please help end invasive research on these chimps and give them the sanctuary they deserve. Urge your U.S. Representative, Kurt Schrader, to support the Great Ape Protection Act.

The Great Ape Protection Act was re-introduced in the House of Representatives last week, on the heels of our undercover investigation. This legislation would phase out invasive research on the more than 1,000 chimpanzees remaining in U.S. laboratories, and lay the groundwork for permanent retirement of the approximately 500 chimpanzees owned by the federal government, including Karen and other chimps at the New Iberia Research Center.

TAKE ACTION
Please make a brief phone call to Representative Schrader at (202) 225-5711. When you call, you'll speak to a staff member who can take your message....leave your name and where you live so it's clear that you are a constituent. When you call, you can say:

"Hello, my name is [your name]. I'm a constituent in [your town]. Last week, ABC News: Nightline aired a report of chimpanzees at the New Iberia Research Center in Louisiana. I'm calling to ask Representative Schrader to please co-sponsor the Towns-Reichert Great Ape Protection Act (H.R. 1326), to stop this cruelty and to save taxpayers millions of dollars. Thank you."

We expect that Congress will receive a huge outpouring of calls on this issue. If you aren't able to get through, please keep trying. After you make your call, send a follow up message and tell your friends and family how they can help, too.

Thank you for speaking out for chimps held in research. They deserve better than a life of torment and misery. Together, we can make a difference for these amazing creatures.

Zoos and the "scientific" misuse of animals speak to peculiar forms of alienation remaining with capitalism from its ascendant age of discovery. Marx is supposed to have said in correspondence with Engels that Darwin had come to discover the laws of English class relations in the jungles, or words to that effect. He certainly said, "Man’s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him." We are working backwards from a peculiar and particular point in human history as we search for our origins and the two points of reference collide in contradictory ways. The apes mentioned above are some of the casualties of that collision.

Speaking more generally, Marxism has paid a great deal of attention to Darwin and his ideas over time. You can read one outstanding essay on Darwin from a Marxist point of view here.