It's becoming increasingly easy to see that Anthony Fauci isn't just a power-mad bureaucrat, but also a malignant narcissist.  Over the last two days, increasingly awful details have emerged about the beagles who suffered terribly thanks to experiments Fauci funded.  Then, yesterday, word emerged that the entire NIH is good with torturing animals, for the NIH has used hundreds of thousands in taxpayer dollars for cruel experiments on animals, all of them of seemingly dubious value.

As is true for so many Americans, I am a dog-lover.  I've had dogs for most of my life, and I value them tremendously.  I also admire cats, especially from a distance.  That's why it was awful to read about the animal experiments that Fauci funded with your and my taxpayer dollars.

Ned Barnett wrote about the whole stomach-churning thing here.  He helps us understand that, while half of America is okay with Fauci paying for the Wuhan lab to do research on making bat COVID contagious to humans, thereby likely killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, most Americans will not tolerate his cruelty to dogs.

Overall, when one combines Fauci's arrogance, blatant lies, and seeming obsession with engaging in behaviors that kill humans by the hundreds of thousands and dogs by the scores, the description for a malignant narcissist just seems so...fitting:

Yesterday, it emerged that the entire National Institutes of Health shows this callous regard for animals.  Mind you, as someone who is neither a vegetarian nor a vivisectionist, I recognize that there is a utility to conducting certain experiments on animals.  Animals are not humans, and while we should never deliberately cause them suffering, it doesn't mean that we humans, sitting at the top of the food chain, shouldn't benefit from animals, whether as companions, working animals, or food.  It's that bit about never deliberately causing them suffering that seems unclear to the people at the NIH, including Fauci.

The National File reports that the White Coat Waste Project has discovered that the National Primate Research Centers (NPRCs), which receive more than $100 million per year from taxpayers, have been doing some pretty nasty things to monkeys:

Some of the experiments done by the NIH-funded NPRC's [sic] involve:

1. Turning monkeys into "binge-drinker" alcoholics (Oregon NPRC);
2. Surgically-inducing heart attacks in monkeys (Washington NPRC);
3. Exposing monkeys to biological weapons (Tulane NPRC);
4. Intentionally threatening monkeys to cause fear and anxiety (California NPRC);
5. Psychologically tormenting baboons (Southwest NPRC);
6. Drilling into monkeys' skulls and injecting them with the ADHD-drug Ritalin (Wisconsin NPRC); and
7. Drilling to monkeys' skulls and injected toxins to destroy their brains and cripple their limbs (Yerkes NPRC)

The organization unearthed a video from Emory University's Yerkes National Primate Research Center, detailing how monkeys are locked alone in small cages where they have holes drilled into their skulls. After the holes are drilled, doctors reportedly screw in metal head restraining devices, implant electrodes and inject toxins into the monkey's brains.

The toxic brain injections reportedly "destroy monkey's brains and cause them to lose control of their limbs, mouths, and other body parts."

Twenty or so years ago, an article in the New York Times discussed ethical meat-eating.  The author, whose name I've long since forgotten, said that, so far as we know, animals lack an existential sense.  They have a survival instinct, but neither the cows in the field nor the chickens in their coops spend the day worrying about imminent death.  In other words, none is Babe, the movie pig.

However, animals can experience joy, fear, and pain.  Cows like to chew their cud, chickens to peck around for worms, and pigs to roll in the mud.  This writer said that whenever possible, he ate meat from sources that allowed the animals to enjoy a quality life and then subjected them to a death as free from fear and pain as possible.

Those same principles ought to apply, as best as possible, to animal experimentation.  Assuming that the experiments described above actually had value beyond getting grant money and, for a sadist, torturing animals, they should have been conducted in a way that spared the animals fear and pain.  In California and the Southwest, though, they went out of their way to make the monkeys afraid — and you paid for it.

Our government is out of control.  Whether it's beagles in Tunisia, monkeys in California, children in public schools, or people whose lives are being destroyed over an experimental gene-manipulative vaccine that leaves them contagious and vulnerable to COVID variants, the federal government is using its unconstrained power to bring about fear, suffering, and even death.  This is not what the Founders wanted and, when Americans vote Republicans back into power, those Republicans had better damn well bring the government to heel.

Image: Green monkey by Charles J. Sharp.  CC BY-SA 4.0.

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