ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, August 12, 1996 TAG: 9608120078
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-2 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ROCKVILLE, MD. (AP)
SOURCE: TOM BERSON THE PRINCE GEORGE'S JOURNAL
Rick Swain spent 24 years investigating homicides, rapes and other crime as a Montgomery County police officer.
He says switching to his new job, as executive director of Norfolk, Va.-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, made perfect sense.
``The police department is about protecting life. I've got just a slightly broader view of that than some people do,'' he said.
Swain, 50, said the two jobs have a lot in common.
``Ninety percent of police work was paperwork and management,'' he said. ``Ninety percent of PETA is educational campaigns aimed at turning people's attention to issues and making them re-evaluate things they've accepted since childhood.''
As executive director, the No.3 position at PETA, Swain is responsible for ``everything and anything administrative or business,'' said group vice president Ingrid Newkirk.
Swain's background as a former police captain is ``a perk to us,'' she said, adding that he will be asked to ``cast half an eye to advising us on investigative strategies.''
Swain got to know Newkirk and PETA co-founder Alex Pacheco, who established the organization in a Takoma Park basement 15 years ago, during the famed Silver Spring monkey investigation in 1981.
Swain led a county police raid on a federally funded laboratory where researcher Edward Taub was experimenting on monkeys, crippling them to learn more about stroke victims.
``The Taub case was an awakening for me. When I walked into that lab, conditions were beyond anything I might have imagined,'' said Swain, who had at that point spent six years in the county police's homicide/sex division.
Some of the animals' bones and spinal cords had been snapped and their wounds were poorly bandaged. Other monkeys had mutilated themselves by tearing or chewing off their limbs.
Taub was convicted of violating state animal cruelty statutes, but the state Court of Appeals reversed the conviction, saying the state did not have jurisdiction over federally funded research institutions. A civil lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health, which funded the experiments, was also thrown out by the courts.
But Swain was moved by what he had seen in the lab, and his new friends at PETA persuaded him to examine his own conceptions about the use of animals by humans.
``We break, cage, enslave animals and call it a circus? I have a real problem with that,'' Swain said. ``When I was a kid, I thought it was OK, too, but we have to look at those things again and again.''
Swain will be moving to Virginia when PETA moves its headquarters this summer from Rockville to Norfolk.
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