Beware, collegiate science nerds: Just when you thought it was safe to spend the summer watching "Project Runway" and exploring the effects of medical marijuana, a new threat has emerged. Activists with the radical animal rights group Negotiation is Over are launching a new campaign to target budding doctors and scientists in Florida who dissect animals.
In August, the group will start distributing fliers on college campuses, asking students to rat out their friends. They're offering $100 to people who will provide the names, pictures, addresses, phone numbers, and other identifying information about students who conduct animal experiments. "Students Earn Ea$y Money!" the flier proclaims. "Provide us with the following, you can quit your part-time job."
"We want to force vivisection students to reconsider their plans and chose more humane
alternatives," says Camille Marino, founder of Negotiation is Over.
By publishing students, names, photos, and addresses, she adds, "We want to make their lives unbearably uncomfortable."
Marino's group helped launch the recent protests against the Puppy Palace in Hollywood, in which activists urged the store to stop selling commercially bred dogs. But the latest campaign --which specifically targets college students who want to pursue biomedical research -- is a new tactic, Marino says. A similar campaign has already begun at the University of Florida, but Marino would not identify which other colleges would be targeted.
"What we want to do is subvert the animal experimentation curriculum. Essentially, we want to shut it down," she says.
According to Marino, students can use computer models instead of experimenting on dead animals. She's hoping this campaign will encourage young scientists to steer clear of biotech institutions such as the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, and instead work for companies that refuse to experiment on animals.
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