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| Volume 48, Number 3, Fall 1999 |
by Earle Holland
"Personally, I like the girl with the neon orange hair and the big dog."
That was the best I had to offer to John Petry as we watched the two dozen protesters straggle up the sidewalk and begin to form in front of Wiseman Hall. Petrie, a captain with the university police department and the senior cop on site for the morning, was a quiet, subdued kind of guy, not given to histrionics.
"If they behave," he'd said, "they can demonstrate all they want. If not, well . . ."
Wiseman is the largest of Ohio State University's 20-plus vivaria-animal-holding facilities-and the most prominent. It is wedged in between a new high-rise medical research building and two hospitals. While the first two floors are devoted to animal use, the top three have for years housed the university's Comprehensive Cancer Center. Inside, Wiseman holds all manner of mice and rats, hogs, some dogs and even chinchillas . . . and primates, specifically a handful of baboons and macaque monkeys.
It was these latter primates that had drawn the protesters this time. We were stop number 15 on the Primate Freedom Tour, a coordinated, summer-long attack on 25 research centers where primates were used in research. At each stop, roughly two dozen protesters, along with whatever local support they could muster, would march on the facility demanding a halt in the use of primates for research and an open forum for debate on the question of animal research.
If all went well for the protesters, their demands would be replayed on TV and radio newscasts the rest of the day and in major local newspaper coverage the day after. That kind of coverage attracted more supporters and supporters brought donations and the donations were the fuel that let the protesters continue their fight.
But the Ohio State protest wasn't starting as well as they'd hoped. The Tour had a well-used, two-piece bus that traveled from site to site but that morning, the bus was nowhere to be seen. Rumor had it that the vehicle had broken down and the protesters were forced to car pool. It may not have been true but it sounded good on that early August morning.
Outside of Wiseman, the protesters, placards high, were preaching the "good news" of stopping animal research to anyone who would listen. But few people passed by. Earlier in the summer, 12th Avenue in front of Wiseman was closed to through traffic while steam lines were re-routed to the new Heart and Lung Institute across the street. The street wasn't scheduled to re-open for several weeks so the protest, in effect, was taking place on a dead-end street.
Inside Wiseman, lab animal care veterinarian Doug Stone was taping posters to the inside of the front glass, posters that brought scowls from the protesters outside, that read:
"Thanks to animal research they'll be able to protest 20.8 years longer.''
The local media were on hand. A reporter for the Columbus Dispatch; another from the student newspaper, The Lantern. A reporter and videographer from the CBS affiliate station in town were there. A cameraman from the ABC affiliate also showed without a reporter in tow-"They only wanted some tape," he'd explained.
Our intentions were simple: let the demonstrators protest all they want. Keep them safe and avoid confrontations, if possible. And with the protesters outnumbering spectators two to one, the plan seemed to be working. The TV reporter, with camera rolling, was interviewing one of the protest leaders who irately asked the journalist, "Do you have any idea what they're doing in there?"
"Yes," the reporter answered simply. "They gave us a tour last week."
The videotape showed at least 10 seconds of "dead air" as the protestor's jaw dropped in dismay.
Our plans for dealing with the Primate Freedom Tour had begun several months earlier.
Like other major research universities, Ohio State has had its share of animal rights protests, break-ins and incidents but overall, we have been remarkably lucky. Although the local group POET-Protect Our Earth's Treasures-was closely aligned with PETA-People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, perhaps the country's most powerful group of animal rights activists-the locals never seemed to be able to muster their forces effectively enough to garner much attention and outrage.
But their lack of success hasn't made us complacent. If anything, we fear we're living on borrowed time, that something big will eventually land at our door. Because of that belief, we formed a small, ad hoc, crisis group leading preparations 15 years ago. Made up of representatives from University Public Safety, Environmental Safety and Health, Office of Research, University Communications, University Lab Animal Resources, Office of Legal Affairs, and appropriate city police and fire officials, the group recommends what institutional actions should take place whereever animal rights issues are concerned.
In Ohio, public institutions are subject to an open meetings law and a public records law which are both more demanding than federal Freedom of Information guidelines. Current legal opinions hold that university employees-faculty and staff-are public officials under the law and all records they produce or maintain are available on request-even the notes taken during a meeting. Animal rights activists regularly attend the meetings of the university's IRB, the Institutional Lab Animal Care and Use Committee, and have to date requested and received tens of thousands of copies of records covering animal research on campus. So the crisis group operates with only an oral history-no real records. And since the crisis group is not a policy-making body, and there is a law enforcement exemption to the open meetings law, our planning sessions remain closed.
During one of those meetings three months before the Tour was to arrive, we devised the plan. We knew we'd be accused of heinous treatment of animals by the protesters. They assumed we'd close our facilities to visitors, suggesting a cloak of secrecy behind which we would hide. Why not fling open the doors and invite visitors the week before the Tour?
Which is exactly what we did, stealing the news hook from the protesters arriving the next week.
Compared with other institutions on the Tour, Ohio State was small potatoes. Even thought it is a massive university-a community of 80,000-plus souls on campus every day-our use of primates in research is minimal. All told, we had fewer than 20 animals involved in projects at the time of the Tour and most of those were not involved in invasive biomedical research.
One such effort, the Comparative Cognition Project run by psychology professor Sally Boysen, had garnered more media coverage over the years than any other effort. Half of the primates on campus, including her nine chimpanzees, are involved in experiments to understand learning in these animals. Respected by many animal rights activists and outspoken in her own right against invasive research, Boysen is the perfect researcher for media interviews-charismatic, irreverent, opinionated and outspoken, she can win over even devout opponents.
But balancing out the positive side that Boysen offered, the university had its albatross-a $2.3 million "primate research facility" barely a hundred yards east of her chimp colony. The building, less than two years old and containing BSL2 (Biosafety Level) and BSL3 laboratories, had been built in preparation for major research projects on simian immunovirus, HIV and other pathogens. It had been highly touted and was well known by activists. It was sure to be a target, even though the research funding for the projects had dried up, the investigators had moved on to other universities and the facility was now home only to mice and rats, and very few of them at that.
Five days before the Tour arrived at Ohio State, the university invited reporters to both Boysen's chimp colony and to the primate research facility to see the rats! For two hours, they walked through the partially used building, talking with animal handlers, veterinarians, lab animal care officials and researchers. They spent half the time with Boysen who showed off the two baby chimps she'd rescued six months earlier.
The next day, the Akron Beacon Journal ran an Associated Press story on the event:
"Ohio State Talks About Animal Research in Advance of Protest."
The Columbus Dispatch's story was more explicit:
"OSU Fires Pre-Emptive Strike in Debate Over Primate Research: Animal Rights Activists Plan to Protest at the University Next Week as Part of a Nationwide Tour."
Their television counterparts ran similar stories. Phrases like "much ado about nothing" and "openness and honesty in the face of protests" seemed too good to be true but they did air-in some cases, several times on different newscasts.
What was it that George Peppard used to say? "I love it when a plan comes together."
Back at Wiseman, the lead protester was trying to recover from hearing the reporter say she'd already toured the facility and found nothing wrong.
"But did they let you inside this building," he asked?
In fact, we hadn't. The reporter knew it and said so.
"Well go ask 'em. See if they'll let you inside this place."
And she did just that-walked right up to the door, which we opened for her, and asked to come inside since our tour the previous week hadn't included Wiseman.
One of the three Ohio State projects using primates was a long-running effort to perfect an anti-fertility vaccine. The work had produced its share of animal use protests over the years but it finally yielded an anti-HCG (Human Chorionic Gonadotropin) vaccine that was being tested in Australia. The remaining three baboons in Wiseman were no longer used for actual experiments but were cared for to monitor their long-term health. And since baboons are notoriously nasty animals, showing them to a reporter wouldn't have been our first choice, if we'd had one.
"Come on in," Bill Yonushonis said to the reporter. Yonushonis is a retired army colonel, an experienced lab animal veterinarian and the senior official on campus responsible for the care of our animals. Over the years, he's learned the hard way that the best way to deal with the news media is honestly. He led the reporter and her videographer through several doors to the room containing the baboon and explained the history of the research.
"Can we see them?"
"Sure," he said, flinging open the door to show the three baboons neat, quiet and content as they watched morning talk shows on a television. The videotape rolled, one baboon turned to the reporter and waved, I swear.
It was not a good day for protester Craig Rosebraugh, lead spokesman for the Primate Freedom Tour. The media had not been impressed with his claims. He'd been pre-empted by the media tour a week before and few passersby had seemed to care. After the morning's demonstration at Wiseman, the protesters had split up and headed in various directions, mostly off campus. University police were discreetly trailing those who remaining on campus, including Rosebraugh.
But all was not lost. Through an acquaintance he'd convinced a campus philosophy teacher to let him speak to an afternoon graduate seminar about the evils of using animals for research and how corrupt the institution and its researchers were. Rosebraugh and several other protestors wound their way through building halls to the door of the seminar room. The professor met him there.
"You are welcome to come in," the prof said plainly.
"Your friends are not. They'll have to leave. The room's
too small." The entourage turned and left.
Rosebraugh's plan, apparently, was to speak for half of the two-hour
class and then take questions.
The professor's note to university officials afterwards explained that things didn't work out that way. Five minutes into the class, students interrupted with their first question:
"Why are you wasting everybody's time doing this?" one student asked.
The conversation went downhill from there.
On the last day of the Tour's stop in Columbus, protesters assembled on the steps of Bricker Hall, the university's main administration building. It was a tactic they'd used at universities earlier-demand a meeting with university officials during which they'd demand that the institution host a public forum to debate animal use in research.
Just before lunch, with cameras rolling and print reporters in attendance, Rosebraugh et al., issued his demands, claiming his intent to remain there until the university bowed to their demands-an unlikely expectation given that the Tour bus had to leave Columbus early that afternoon if they were to make the next stop on their route-Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.
Yonushonis emerged from the building, flanked by the vice presidents for research and university relations and the associate VP for medical research. Rosebraugh repeated the demands and Yonushonis responded with the cameras focused in tight:
"Sounds like a great idea-send me a proposal and we'll work it out."
"No, we want to sit down now and hammer things out this afternoon."
"Nope, that's not how it's done. You send in a proposal. We'll review it and there's a very good chance we'll do it," Yonushonis explained. "That's fair, isn't it?"
Standing just to the side, the reporter nodded. The cameraman nodded. The three VPs nodded. Even a protester or two nodded before they realized what they were doing. And the Primate Freedom Tour's visit to Ohio State fizzled to an end.
Only brief, fair stories ran on the nightly newscasts and in the newspapers the next morning.
In truth, we were lucky. We are a rather small player in a large game. The plans we'd made in advance all worked out right. And people on both sides were, for the most part, civil to each other. We'd lived up to our claims of openness as a public university. The faculty researchers were non-plussed-as they often are-and we moved on to the next crisis.
At other institutions, the Tour's visits led to altercations
and arrests. The events were not pretty and the subsequent news
coverage was downright ugly.
And next year, when the Tour returns, we don't expect to be as
lucky or to get off as easy.
But as for me, I'm looking forward to the girl with the orange hair.
Earle Holland is director of research communications at Ohio State where he also teaches a graduate course in science writing. His weekly column Geofacts is distributed by the New York Times Syndicate. He can be reached at Holland.8@osu.edu.