Alex Pacheco (activist)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
.jpg)
Alexander Fernando Pacheco (born August 1958) is an American animal rights activist. He is co-founder and former chairman of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), founder of All American Animals,[1] a member of the advisory board of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society,[2] and the creator of 1-800-Save-a-Pet.com.[3]
Pacheco first came to public attention in 1981 for his role in what became known as the Silver Spring monkeys case, a campaign to save 17 crab-eating macaques who were undergoing experiments in the Institute for Biological Research in Silver Spring, Maryland. Oliver Stone writes that the political campaign to save the monkeys and highlight their treatment gave birth to the animal rights movement in the United States.
The campaign began when Pacheco took a job as a volunteer at the Institute to learn more about animal research as part of his animal rights activism. Edward Taub, a psychologist, was engaged there in research that involved removing the sensory input from monkeys' limbs, then withholding food and subjecting them to electric shocks to force the animals to use the limbs they could not feel.[4][5] Largely because of the conditions in which the monkeys were kept, Pacheco reported Taub for violations of animal cruelty laws. Police raided the lab and seized the monkeys. Taub was charged with 119 counts of animal cruelty, the first such charges to be brought in the U.S. against a research scientist. He was convicted on 6 counts, but the convictions were later overturned on appeal, one of them as the result of a jurisdictional technicality.[6]
The resulting legal battle for custody of the monkeys reached the United States Supreme Court, the first animal-rights case to do so,[7] generating a large amount of publicity for PETA, and transforming it from what Ingrid Newkirk called "five people in a basement" into a national movement.[8] As a result of the case, the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Science, Research and Technology held hearings which led to the 1985 Animal Welfare Act,[9] and in 1986, changes in United States Public Health Service guidelines for animals used in animal research included a requirement that each institution seeking federal funding have an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee whose job it is to oversee how laboratory animals within that institution are cared for.[6]
Contents |
[edit] Early life
Pacheco was born in Joliet, Illinois, but moved to Mexico with his family when he was very young, where he was raised near the ocean with his siblings, Jimmy and Mary, by his Mexican father, a physician, and his mother, an American nurse.[10]
Kathy Snow Guillermo writes in Monkey Business that Pacheco's early life was filled with animals. Bats lived in the rubber trees in his front yard, snakes slept behind nearby rocks, and fishermen regularly dragged dolphins out of the water onto the beach. Instead of animals being killed for food in slaughterhouses, pigs, oxen, chickens, and turkeys were frequently killed in front of him.[10]
The family left Mexico when Pacheco was in junior high, and moved between Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. His interest in animals continued, and he would often buy turtles and birds from pet stores, and even a baby crab-eating macaque, whom he called Chi Chi, and who took to perching on his shoulder as he walked around the house.[10]
He attended Catholic university in Ohio, intending to enter the priesthood, but during a visit to Canada in his first year at university, he visited a friend who worked at a meat-packing plant. Despite his early exposure in Mexico to animals being killed for food, he was shocked by the sight of two men throwing a newborn calf, cut from the uterus of its slaughtered mother, into a dumpster. Later in the week, a friend gave him a copy of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, and he returned to Ohio a vegetarian. His heart was no longer in becoming a priest, and he decided to attend Ohio State University instead, and to devote himself to helping what he called "other-than-human beings."[10]
[edit] Early activism
At university, Pacheco organized campaigns against the use of leghold traps and castrating pigs and cattle without anesthetic. As Ohio is an agricultural state, his activism met with stiff opposition and the occasional anonymous telephone call threatening to blow his head off.[10]
In 1979, he attended a talk in Columbus by Cleveland Amory of Saturday Review, who was also the founder of the Fund for Animals, which ran the anti-whaling vessel, Sea Shepherd. He sought Amory out after the talk and begged to be allowed to volunteer, joining the ship for the summer in the engine room and as a deckhand, as it famously rammed and sank the Portuguese whaling ship, the Sierra.[10]
The Peace Abbey, of Sherborn, MA, awarded Alex Pacheco with the Courage of Conscience award March 20, 1995. [11]
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ All American Animals, accessed February 16, 2008.
- ^ "Board of Advisors, Alex Pacheco", Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
- ^ 1-800-Save-a-Pet.com].
- ^ Johnson, David. "Review of The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force", curledup.com, 2003.
- ^ Doidge, Norman. The Brain That Changes Itself. Viking Penguin 2007, p. 141.
- ^ a b Carlson, Peter. "The Strange Case of the Silver Spring Monkeys," The Washington Post magazine, February 24, 1991.
- ^ Newkirk, Ingrid. Free the Animals. Lantern, 2000.
- ^ Schwartz, Jeffrey and Begley, Sharon. The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. HarperCollins, 2002 p. 161.
- ^ Food Security Act of 1985 subtitle F
- ^ a b c d e f Guillermo, Kathy Snow. Monkey Business. National Press Books, 1993, pp. 30-33.
- ^ http://www.peaceabbey.org/awards/cocrecipientlist.html
[edit] Further reading
- Pacheco, Alex and Francione, Anna. "The Silver Spring Monkeys" in Singer, Peter. In Defense of Animals. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985, pp. 135-147.
- Pacheco, Alex. Address to the 2007 Animal Rights Conference, YouTube, retrieved February 16, 2008.
- Sideris, Lisa et al. "Roots of Concern with Nonhuman Animals in Biomedical Ethics", Institute for Laboratory Animal Research Journal, volume 4, issue 1, 1999.
