Stop experiments on gay sheep!

[Willow's Grrl]

Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), a school that has received criticism in the past for torturing monkeys in its labs, has officially been outed. Information has been brought to light about ridiculous “gay sheep” experiments that are being conducted at the school. You heard right—OHSU experimenter Charles Roselli is spending millions of taxpayer dollars to kill homosexual rams and cut open their brains in an attempt to find the hormone behind homosexual tendencies so that these tendencies can be changed. Roselli is also working with experimenter Frederick Stormshak of Oregon State University (OSU), who has surgically inserted an estrogen implant in the bodies of these rams in an effort “to restore tissue levels of estrogen comparable to those of heterosexual rams and affect sexual behavior accordingly.”

To put it simply, these experimenters believe that homosexuality is a defect that needs to be fixed, and they’re cutting open and killing gay sheep to do it. Roselli has made it very clear that he intends to use the findings of his experiments to “cure” humans next. In his application for public funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), he states that “this research also has broader implications for understanding the development and control of sexual motivation and mate selection across mammalian species, including humans.”

--from peta2.com

Help stop these pointless experiments on gay sheep!

Go to: http://getactive.peta.org/campaign/p2ga ... xperiments and use the online form to write to OSU President Edward Ray and OHSU President-Elect Joseph Robertson Jr. asking that they immediately stop these needless “gay sheep” experiments and use taxpayers’ money for legitimate research instead.

[tarawhipped]

With all due respect, it seems to me that Peta is trying to shock gays and lesbians into supporting their animal rights agenda through half-truths and misinformation. Peta has a long-standing history of being opposed to any experiments utilizing animals, regardless of the scientific or medical benefits, and they're not all "ridiculous" and "pointless." There are legitimate reasons to look for homosexuality in the animal world: it goes to prove that it is nature, not nurture that determines sexuality. There are still a great many people out there who believe that we 'choose' to be gay or lesbian, and therefore should not be a protected group when it comes to equality in jobs, housing, etc.

As for the second point, affecting the sexual preference of the animal, this OHSU press release mentions that "They would also like to know whether sexual preferences can be altered by manipulating the prenatal hormone environment, for instance by using drugs to prevent the actions of androgen in the fetal sheep brain." That doesn't actually specify that gay sheeps are being "cured"...for all we know, they could be turning straight sheep gay. But that possibility wouldn't fit in with Peta's scare tactics, I suppose.

There are plenty of people (straight, gays, and lesbians) who agree with Peta's ideology, and that's their prerogative. But when Peta starts using baseless charges of homophobia and fear of a "homosexual cure," to try and garner support from the gay and lesbian community, that's pathetic. These tactics are the reason I'll never support Peta---or any other extremist organization.
-Cam

[tarawhipped]

Sorry to double post, but I found some follow-up information on this issue on Crooks and Liars. The Next Hurrah blog comments on The London Times recent article repeating this claim, and provides criticism that PETA is merely trying to attack any animal-based experiments, using misinformation and scare tactics to attract the gay community to its cause.

Crooks and liars links to several articlesdiscussing the experiments, both of which completely dispute practically everything PETA claims, first and foremost that Roselli et al are trying to "cure" homosexual sheep in any way. In fact, just the opposite is true:

Roselli found that a brain region linked with sexual behavior was twice as big in heterosexual as homosexual rams. The gay rams also had lower brain levels of an enzyme that activates testosterone and promotes typical male sexual behavior.

So in addition to brain studies, Roselli is waiting for a group of lambs born last spring to reach sexual maturity. Their mothers were dosed with drugs to block the action of male hormones in the fetuses. If Roselli's hypothesis is correct, rams born of this experiment will be disproportionately gay.

So, not only are they not "cutting open and killing gay sheep," they are actually making gay sheep by affecting their development in the womb, and then raising them to study their behavior in order to confirm their hypothesis. The fact that these articles are from over 1 and 2 years ago, respectively, goes to show that PETA had access to correct information and chose to ignore it.

PETA's disingenuosness doesn't surprise me, but it really irks the hell out of me that they're trying to mislead the gay community into protesting a study that actually proves homosexuality is based in nature, not choice.

-Cam