Alex Pacheco (activist)
| Alex Pacheco | |
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| Born | August 1958 (age 53) Joliet, Illinois |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Ohio State University |
| Known for | Animal rights advocacy Former member of the Sea Shepherd Co-founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals |
| Parents | Jimmy and Mary Pacheco |
| Awards | Courage of Conscience Award from the Peace Abbey of Sherborn, MA, March 20, 1995. Animal Activists Hall of Fame in 2001. |
Alexander Fernando Pacheco (born August 1958) is an American animal rights activist. He is the co-founder and former chairman of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). He is a member of the advisory board of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society,[1] and founder of Adopt-a-Pet and 600 Million Stray Dogs Need You.[2]
Pacheco came to public attention in 1981 for his role, along with Ingrid Newkirk, in what became known as the Silver Spring monkeys case, a campaign to release 17 crab-eating macaques who were undergoing experiments in the Institute of Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland. Oliver Stone writes that the political campaign to save the monkeys gave birth to the animal rights movement in the United States. Pacheco subsequently was the chairman of PETA for 20 years.
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[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.[3]
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.[3]
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.[3]
He attended Catholic university in Ohio, intending to enter the priesthood. He resided in a home with 7 brothers and 3 priests. 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 as 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."[3]
[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.[3]
In 1979, he attended a talk in Columbus, Ohio by Cleveland Amory of the Saturday Review, who was also the founder of the Fund for Animals, which ran the anti-whaling vessel, the Sea Shepherd. He sought Amory out after the talk and begged to be allowed to volunteer. Pacheco first crewed with Captain Paul Watson on the ship for the summer in 1979 (and again in 2003), in the engine room and as a deckhand. He was present as it famously rammed and sank the Portuguese whaling ship, the Sierra in the Atlantic. Both the Sea Shepherd and the Sierra were sunk after being seized by the Portuguese authorities.[3]
[edit] Silver spring monkeys case
The case began when Pacheco took a job as a volunteer in the summer of 1981 inside the Institute of Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland to learn more about animal research. Edward Taub, a psychologist, was cutting sensory ganglia that supplied nerves to the fingers, hands, arms, and legs of 17 macaque monkeys—a process known as "deafferentation"—so that the monkeys could not feel them. Some of the monkeys had had their entire spinal columns deafferented. Taub then used restraint, electric shock, and withholding of food and water to force them to use the parts of their bodies they could not feel. The research led in part to the discovery of neuroplasticity within the primate motor system and a new and successful therapy for stroke victims called constraint-induced movement therapy.[4][5][6] As a result of this technique, stroke victims who had been seriously disabled for many years regained the use of limbs that had been almost completely paralyzed.[7]
Pacheco had access to the lab and, it is contended, staged several of the photos.[4] He reported Taub for violations of animal cruelty laws based on the monkeys' living conditions. Police raided the lab, seized the monkeys (which they then handed over to PETA—a move which resulted in their subsequent disappearance[4]), and charged Taub with 119 counts of animal cruelty and failure to provide adequate veterinary care, the first such charges to be brought in the U.S. against a research scientist. 113 charges were dismissed immediately at the first hearing.[4] He was convicted on six misdemeanor counts of failure to provide adequate veterinary care. Five of these counts were dismissed after a second trial, and the final conviction was overturned on appeal when the court ruled that Maryland's Prevention of Cruelty to Animals law did not apply to researchers.[8]
PETA's removal of the monkeys, which was described by a critic as "theft of court evidence"[4] resulted in a legal battle for custody of the monkeys, which reached the United States Supreme Court, the first animal-rights case to do so,[9] 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.[10] As a result of the case, the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Science, Research and Technology held hearings that led to the 1985 Animal Welfare Act,[11] 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.[8] The Peace Abbey, of Sherborn, MA, awarded Alex Pacheco with the Courage of Conscience award March 20, 1995.[12]
[edit] References
- ^ "Board of Advisors, Alex Pacheco", Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
- ^ 600 Million Stray Dogs Need You
- ^ a b c d e f Guillermo, Kathy Snow. Monkey Business. National Press Books, 1993, pp. 30-33.
- ^ a b c d e Doidge, Norman. The Brain That Changes Itself. Viking Penguin, 2007, p. 141.
- ^ "Constraint-Induced Movement Therapy", excerpted from "A Rehab Revolution," Stroke Connection Magazine, September/October 2004, accessed June 26, 2010.
- ^ Carlson, Peter. "The Great Silver Spring Monkey Debate", The Washington Post magazine, February 24, 1991.
- ^ Constraint-Induced Movement Therapy," "A Rehab Revolution," Stroke Connection Magazine, September/October 2004.
- ^ 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
- ^ The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Recipients List
[edit] Further reading
- Pacheco, Alex. "Video testimony on the Silver Spring monkeys case", U.S. House Subcommittee on Science, Research, and Technology, PETA, accessed July 1, 2010.
- 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.
[edit] See also
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