Dear Friends, One of the first anti-vivisection signs I ever saw read, “Vivisection Scum!” When animal experimenters tell you they care, it’s rubbish. At the time, I thought, “Ugh, that’s so nasty.” Now I wonder if that person hadn’t had the sort of experience that we had trying to rescue 48 beagles from Calvert Laboratories, where they poison dogs, rats and monkeys to test chemicals the old-fashioned way. Did we shout, stomp our feet and throw rocks? No, we wrote a polite letter, saying that we’d learned that they wanted to unload 48 female beagles and could we please be permitted to find them homes? Calvert’s CEO, Charles Spainhour, claimed he “wanted only the best for the dogs” but blustered that “lab dogs” don’t settle well into homes. Funny, we’d just placed dogs from another lab and they were doing fine. Next stalling tactic: “But what if one bites someone?” We offered to sign a legal liability waiver. Ducking past Dr. Spainhour’s secretary, I caught him on the phone. He told me he’d consider it. (However, a Calvert staffer leaked us a memo in which Spainhour talks of the “battle of wits” he was waging and how the industry was looking for him to “win”!) Suddenly, Calvert declared that the dogs had “gone to a new home.” In other words, to a breeding facility to be stuck in cages, doomed to churn out puppies for experiments until they die. John F. Kennedy said, “Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” Spainhour lost his “battle of wits” by denying the dogs a decent life. When you slam the door on polite discourse, people start writing “scum” on placards. What he has done is to prove to the fence-sitters that when animal experimenters tell you they care, it’s rubbish. He has shown that, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, “Anyone who would experiment on an animal wouldn’t hesitate to lie about it.” For the animals, Ingrid E. Newkirk President