Billboards pit rat vs. girl in life-and-death struggle

The founder of PETA once famously suggested that, “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” But new billboards that popped up in Palatine, Elk Grove Village, Northbrook, Wood Dale and Des Plaines are making people do their own math to determine if a pink-eyed, white rat with a long tail is the same as an adorable little girl with big brown eyes.

“Who would you rather see live?” the billboards ask as they show the little girl on the right and the rat on the left above the researchsaves.org web address.

While the inability to text “girl” or “rat” immediately on their cellphones no doubt confuses and frustrates Americans used to instant gratification voting, the billboards' sponsor says “girl” is winning.

“We've been getting a real good response. I monitor the social media landscape and people really like it,” says Liz Hodge, director of media and marketing communications for the Washington-based Foundation for Biomedical Research (www.fbresearch.org), which says medical advancements always have and continue to need animal research.

Granted, had the billboard pitted a big-eyed puppy vs. Bernie Madoff, a grinning chimp vs. Charlie Sheen, that same rat against Ann Coulter or a zebrafish vs. a newspaper columnist, the outcome might be different.

Critics of medical research involving animals find the billboards “disingenuous,” says Dr. John J. Pippen, a cardiologist who is senior medical and research adviser for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (www.pcrm.org), which promotes alternatives to medical and drug research on animals.

“It's not a choice between a laboratory animal and a child,” says Pippen, who argues that animal testing doesn't translate to human cures and that 90 percent of the drugs that work on animals fail to do the same for humans.

Followers of PETA (whose founder's original full quote equated a rat with a boy when it came to the ability to feel pain, hunger and thirst) generally come from a purely ethical stance on behalf of animals. But Pippen points to others who base their opposition to animal testing on “the science.”

Pippen says he had his “epiphany” after conducting cardiac research on dogs in 1986 and '87. His research, in which the hearts of dogs were harvested, only proved a benefit “to my career” and didn't advance human cardiology, Pippen says.

The Foundation for Biomedical Research counters that animals have played key roles for centuries in the development of everything from vaccines to painkillers to surgical procedures. Nearly all lab animals are rodents specifically bred for researchers.

The federal Food and Drug Administration mandates that medicines and devices be tested on animals before they can be approved for humans. The Department of Agriculture and the Schaumburg-based American Veterinary Medical Association, which has a zero-tolerance policy against animal cruelty, support research on animals.

While urging the move toward the “three Rs” — reducing the use of animals, refining procedures to improve the lives of lab animals, and replacing animals with other options, such as computer modeling or tissue experiments, whenever possible — “at the end of the day, we still need to use animals,” says Gail Golab, a veterinarian and director of animal welfare for the AVMA. She adds that many of the human medicines and surgical procedures that involved experiments on animals later are used to make the lives of other animals better.

From the “Great Ape Protection and Cost Saving Act of 2011” introduced in the Senate earlier this month to the conversations fueled by those new billboards, both sides agree that the public needs to learn more about research and testing on animals. Clearly, there are more complex questions to that billboard than “Who would you rather see live?” For instance, some grammarians see the billboard and suggest it should read “Whom would you rather see live?”