BOB TEDESCHI: ‘In 1995, when Anthony Bellotti was 17 and slogging through a summer internship in an animal research lab, he was struck not by how the work could help the millions of people suffering from heart disease, but by the plight of the pigs being hoisted by their hind legs onto tables. “They were always screaming,” he said. “I thought, ‘Something’s wrong with this picture.’” He still hoped to one day join his father in the medical field, but the experience triggered a more lasting ambition: rolling back animal testing, which helped refine vaccines that saved millions from polio and smallpox, among others, as well as treatments for many other diseases.
Now the 39-year-old founder of an animal rights group, Bellotti last month achieved an important victory for opponents of animal testing. He played a key role in pressuring the Food and Drug Administration to shut down a nicotine-addiction study in which four monkeys died, and prompting the appointment of an independent investigator to look into the agency’s animal research program…
Emboldened by that success, Bellotti is… publicizing more government-backed medical tests that he believes taxpayers oppose. It is, he suggests, a wholly novel approach to animal-rights advocacy, since no one has previously sold this idea as a way to cut government waste. “Animal experiments have been an issue since the Reconstruction,” he said. “We found a new way of looking at an old idea. We figured out the winning formula”.’ SOURCE…
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