DATE: Wednesday, July 2, 1997               TAG: 9707020020

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B12  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: BY KATHY SNOW GUILLERMO 

                                            LENGTH:   82 lines

WHO IS REALLY VIOLENT?

The hot iron seared into the soft flesh of the cow's face. The smell of burning skin filled the air as the frightened animal - its head held in a vise - bawled in agony. Few had heard of face branding until People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals exposed the practice, but for years it was used to identify cattle entering the U.S. from Mexico.

Like face branding, much of what is done to animals occurs out of sight. Most people never know of it - until someone blows the whistle, often by calling PETA. At General Motors, pigs were strapped into restraint devices and their heads were pummelled with powerful hydraulic devices; at one research laboratory, a ``technician'' beat rabbits to death with his fists; at another, experimenters sliced toes off guinea pigs as a crude means of indentification; at Wright State University, dogs covered with painful sores were left untreated to die in their cages; and on a Maryland fur farm, minks were killed with injections of weed killer.

All these atrocities, and many more, are now history. They were stopped - and animals' lives saved - because PETA worked with government agencies and local law enforcement to end them. Yet recent opinion pieces in The Virginian-Pilot, particularly Cal Thomas' June 21 column, paint PETA as ``extremist.''

Thomas condemns PETA as a ``violent'' group by stringing together a collection of blatantly false information and taking quotations entirely out of context. (For example, it was Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer who likened the concentration-camp-like conditions for factory-farm animals to the treatment of Jews by Nazis. PETA merely paraphrased him).

Who is really ``violent''? The laboratory employee beating a rabbit with his fists or the people who stayed his hand? PETA may sit down in a fur designer's office in peaceful civil disobedience, but the most ``violent'' thing we've ever done was toss a tofu-cream pie, vaudeville-style, at Ronald McDonald, who tells kids that hamburgers grow in patches, like cabbages.

Thomas' charge that PETA does little to help animals in shelters is also untrue. Although PETA was founded to document and expose the exploitation of animals in the food, clothing, experimentation and entertainment industries, we never turn our backs on homeless dogs and cats. PETA has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars helping shelters around the country. We have transformed run-down shelters, provided training in animal care and donated everything from food and equipment to assistance to local sheriff's offices in cruelty cases. We also brought charges against a pound in Ohio for killing animals by cramming them into a gas chamber so old and decrepit, death was accompanied by ear-splitting howls and frantic pawing at the chamber door.

Had Thomas checked, he would have learned that before Ingrid Newkirk co-founded PETA, she cleaned up filthy conditions at the Montgomery County, Md., and Washington, D.C., animal shelters. She went on to be appointed chief of animal disease control for the District of Columbia. For her work implementing innovative new programs, Ms. Newkirk was named ``Washingtonian of the Year.''

Thomas misled readers with ad hominem attacks on PETA. Why? Because Thomas cannot truthfully defend burning, infecting, cutting up and slaughtering millions of animals in U.S. laboratories every year.

Thousands of scientists, physicians, ethicists and others agree with PETA that animal experiments are not only cruel but old-fashioned and ineffective. Sir James Black, the 1988 Nobel prize winner for medicine, pointed out, ``Using a mouse to try to relate to the human condition - there is a fundamental ignorance.'' Shoving our medicines down animals' throats, pouring our drain cleaners into their eyes, forcing them to inhale our cigarette smoke is cruel and crude at best; it short-changes human patients and robs precious health dollars at worst.

Today's forward-thinking researchers understand that experiments on cats do not lead to cures for human ills any more than studying a map of London will help you find your way from Norfolk to New York. These progressive researchers are unlocking the riddles of disease with sophisticated studies of human DNA, whole cells, genetics and epidemiology.

There is an alternative to every cruel act. Although Thomas neglected to mention it, PETA's job is to help consumers discover them. Write to us and we will send delicious vegan recipes, lists of cruelty free products, modern methods for teaching anatomy - you name it.

Exposing cruelty and showing how each of us can avoid participating in it is what PETA is all about, and there's nothing threatening about that. MEMO: Kathy Snow Guillermo is a writer for PETA and the author of

``Monkey Business: The Disturbing Case That Launched the Animal Rights

Movement.'' KEYWORDS: PETA ANOTHER VIEW

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