Mr. Green Genes' Coming Out Party Ushers In a New Era of Unspeakable Atrocities to Be Committed Against Cats by Cloners and Vivisectors

"Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals and the answer is: 'Because the animals are like us.' Ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the animals are not like us.' Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction."
-- Charles R. Magel

Cystic fibrosis is a horrible disease. The excess, blood-streaked mucus produced in the lungs of sufferers not only leads to persistent coughing and breathing difficulties but, quite often, necessitates lung transplants as well. As a consequence, physical activities are almost impossible to sustain.

Similar problems occur in the pancreas and throughout the digestive tract where excess mucus leads to a loss of both appetite and weight which ultimately stunts growth. Diarrhea, constipation, and related excretory difficulties are common as are prolapsed rectums.

The loss of salt through the pores of the skin leads to dehydration and low levels of the mineral in the blood. Polyps often form in the nose and sinuses and weak bones, swollen joints, arthritis, and a clubbing of the fingers are common skeletal ailments.

Ninety-five per cent of male sufferers are infertile and many females have difficulty conceiving. All of those afflicted have a life expectancy of less than half that of normal individuals. Treatments are available which can alleviate some of the discomforts but there is not any cure.

As dreadful as all of that is, up until now the ravages of cystic fibrosis have been confined to humans. All of that is about to change now that the scientific community unilaterally has decided to clone cats with this diabolical disease.

Of course, the public will be spared the spectacle of cats tragically being reduced to wheezing, limping, and incontinent blobs of fur dying agonizingly slow deaths on city sidewalks and doorsteps. Although these atrocities will remain out of sight and out of mind, they nonetheless already are occurring every day of the week in vivisectors' laboratories all around the globe.

This was all made painfully clear when the shamelessly dishonest Betsy L. Dresser of the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species (ACRES) in New Orleans appeared on MSNBC's Today Show on October 23rd and introduced to the world a cat fatuously dubbed Mr. Green Genes in memory of Captain Kangaroo's sidekick, Mr. Green Jeans. (See photo above of the duo along with trainer Kelly Trimble and the show's host, Amy Robach; the gray-headed cat killer is Dresser.)

Au premier coup d'oeil, the six-month-old, seven-pound orange tabby looks pretty much like any normal cat. Looks can be deceiving, however, and he is in fact a clone who has had his DNA manipulated so as make him glow green in the dark. (See photos below.)

He, and others like him, will be used to breed millions of replicas who in turn also will carry the deadly genes that cause cystic fibrosis and other human maladies. From these despicable crimes, vivisectors claim that they are going to find cures for just about all diseases afflicting the human race. Man is then going to conveniently hopscotch over the corpses of all the dead cats and other animals that he has slaughtered and go on to live forever.

At least, that is the game plan that the vivisectors have in store for themselves and the capitalists that they serve. Even if wholesale cures are discovered, it is a sure bet that the hoi polloi never will benefit from them. Instead, they will be left to get by any way that they can; that is, if they are able to stave off being genetically compromised themselves.

At Mr. Green Genes' coming out party, however, it was all fun, games and, above all, some of the biggest lies ever told. Imbecilic host Amy Robach certainly did her part to make the event a roaring success by not asking Dresser one halfway intelligent question.

It is difficult to say, but perhaps she truly is that callous. On the other hand, it must be said that her abysmal ignorance sure looked like the genuine article.

MSNBC's disgraceful scraping and bowing before such a monster as Dresser is just one more classic example of the capitalist media's total dishonesty and corruption. Instead of enlightening the masses, it and other media outlets strive to make blockheads out of everyone.

Dresser got the liars' contest off to a whopper of a start by declaring, "It's totally harmless." (See MSNBC, October 23, 2008, "Me-Yow! This Cat Glows in the Dark.") "He's just a normal cat; he doesn't know he's glowing."

Dresser's colleague at ACRES, C. Earle Pope, yukked it up at Mr. Green Genes' expense for the Atlanta Constitution on October 22nd by quipping, "You can't lose that cat at night." (See "Glow-in-the-Dark Cat a Genetic Success.")

Martha Gomez, another one Dresser's hired cat-killers, joked about the contents of his litter box glowing while Leslie Lyons of UC-Davis chirruped, "The glowing part is the fun part."

Described as being deeply suspicious of strangers and not liking to be held, poor little Mr. Green Genes did not appear to be having much fun as he was bandied about and paraded before the cameras like a new toy. The fact that he spends most of his free time sleeping is an indication that his environment lacks stimulation and that he could be suffering from depression.

ACRES' immediate plans call for him to be used as a stud in order to breed additional fluorescent cats. Should he somehow make it through all of that, Gomez has pledged to allow him to live out his few remaining days at her house.

The breeding, false imprisonment, torture, maiming, and killing of cats in the name of science is certainly nothing new. For hundreds, if indeed not thousands, of years they have been cut up by vivisectors studying the brain and central nervous system, heart disease, sexually transmitted diseases, Alzheimer's, diabetes, and an assortment of other ailments. They also have been dissected and tortured in order to provide researchers and others with cheap thrills.

Reggie Edgerton of UCLA, Serge Rossignol of the University of Montreal, and others have fashioned careers out of breaking the backs of cats in a futile search for a cure for spinal cord injuries. Edgerton's crimes were funded in part by Superman, Christopher Reeve, who was so desperate to walk again that he did not care how many cats that he crippled in the process. Needless to say, that is hardly the kind of behavior that one would expect from a super hero.

Moreover, ten of the ninety-eight Nobel Prizes awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in physiology and medicine over the years have gone to cat-killers.

Due to the inexorable march of scientific progress, the maiming and killing of cats is becoming considerably more systematic, widespread and, above all, sadistic. There are at least three reasons for this and first and foremost among them are recent advances made in cloning.

Texas A&M generally is credited with producing the world's first cloned cat, CC, back in 2001. (See Cat Defender post of January 5, 2007 entitled, "World's First Cloned Cat, CC, Finally Gives Birth to Three Healthy Kittens at Age Five.")

Lou Hawthorne of Genetic Savings and Clone of Sausalito attempted to make his fortune by cloning cats for commercial sale but was unable to make a go of the venture. (See Cat Defender post of October 16, 2006 entitled "Unable to Turn a Profit, California Cat-Cloning Company Goes Out of Business.")

He, unfortunately, has rebounded from his failure with cats and now is back in business cloning dogs at his new company, BioArts International. (See The New York Times, May 21, 2008, "Biotech Company to Auction Chances to Clone a Dog.") This is an especially dire development for dogs who, because of reproductive peculiarities, are considerably more difficult to clone than other mammals.

In order to pull it off, BioArts has formed a partnership with Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in South Korea which employs Hwang Woo Suk who helped to clone the world's first dog, Snuppy, for Seoul National University in 2005. (See Cat Defender post of August 15, 2005 entitled, "South Koreans Clone World's First Dog; Vivisectors and Stem Cell Proponents See $$$.") Hwang, it never must be forgotten, was later discovered to have manufactured research that purported to show that he had cloned human embryos.

Along the same line as cloned cats, Allerca Lifestyle Pets has developed transgenic cats that are allergy-free. For whatever it is worth, the company insists that its cats are the end result of an elaborate breeding process as opposed to genetic manipulation. (See Cat Defender posts of July 10, 2006 and October 10, 2006 entitled, respectively, "More Devilry from Scientific Community as California Company Creates World's First Hypoallergenic Cat" and "Dodgy Allerca and Dishonest CBS Join Forces to Market an Allergy-Free Cat Named Joshua to a Gullible Public.")

Under the guise of saving endangered wild cats, ACRES first got in on the cat cloning craze in 2001 and two years later exhibited to the world a cloned African wildcat named Jazz. Later in July of 2005, African wildcats Madge and Caty became the first clones to naturally reproduce. (See Cat Defender post of September 6, 2005 entitled "Clones of Endangered African Wildcats Give Birth to Eight Naturally-Bred Healthy Kittens in New Orleans.")

In addition to African wildcats, ACRES also is targeting Fishing Cats, Blackfooted Cats, and Rusty-Spotted Cats. (See Cat Defender post of September 15, 2008 entitled "Two Pairs of Diminutive but Ferocious Rusty-Spotted Kittens Are Born at a Zoo in Kent.")

Also on ACRES' hit list are Mexican gray wolves, already savagely mismanaged and preyed upon by both the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and ranchers in the southwest, antelopes, storks, cranes, sea otters, and clouded leopards. (See Cat Defender post of April 17, 2007 entitled "Clouded Leopards of Sumatra and Borneo Are Discovered to Be a Distinct Species from Their Cousins in Mainland Southeast Asia.")

Established in 1996 in order to save endangered species, ACRES subtly has reinvented itself as a latter day Island of Doctor Moreau where cats are cloned with horrible diseases and then peddled to vivisectors.

Nevertheless, the organization is still bamboozling the public out of its shekels on the pretense that it is working to save endangered wild cats and other species. For instance, on its web site the inveterate liars and charlatans proclaim: "The knowledge gained through research at the Center will help scientists and conservationists cope with threats to the most seriously endangered species by developing new reproductive technologies and reintroduction techniques necessary to ensure their long-term survival."

Au contraire, the exact opposite is occurring. ACRES is depleting the population of wild cats by removing them from their natural habitats and imprisoning them in its laboratories. Furthermore, although it runs off at the mouth about returning species to the wild, no specifics are given on its web site.

Perhaps even more importantly, the rewilding of captive-bred animals is a very controversial undertaking with a success rate estimated by some experts to be at no greater than thirty-three per cent. Moreover, if otherwise healthy animals born in captivity must be taught how to fend for themselves before they can be reintroduced to the wild, it is difficult to understand how it would be possible to turn loose unhealthy clones. (See Cat Defender posts of June 23, 2008 and March 11, 2008 entitled, respectively, "Amur Leopards Continue to Slide Towards Extinction as Conservationists Toy with a Controversial Captive Breeding and Rewilding Initiative" and "South China Tigers Are Being Bred and Trained at a South African Reserve for an Eventual Return to the Wild.")

Clearly, captive-breeding programs and clones are not the answer. Money and expertise should be devoted instead to buying up habitats and providing endangered species with around-the-clock police protection. Also, instead of using microchips and radio-collars in order to subjugate the animals, surveillance technology should be employed to keep hunters, capitalists, and other evildoers out of their habitats. (See Cat Defender posts of May 4, 2006 and February 29, 2008 entitled, respectively, "Scientific Community's Use of High-Tech Surveillance Is Aimed at Subjugating, Not Saving, the Animals" and "The Repeated Hounding Down and Tagging of Walruses Exposes Electronic Surveillance as Not Only Cruel but a Fraud.")

Although numerous advancements have been made in mammalian cloning during the past decade, it is still a technology in its infancy with a success rate of only about one per cent. In a review of published studies involving cats and dogs, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and the American Anti-Vivisection Society (AAVS) concluded that three-thousand-six-hundred-fifty-six cloned embryos, three-hundred-twenty oocytes, and two-hundred-fourteen surrogate mothers had been sacrificed just to produce five cloned dogs and eleven cloned cats that had survived for longer than thirty days.

Based upon those statistics alone, the authors concluded that cloners had rounded up and exploited more than five-hundred cats and dogs. The carnage without a doubt would have been significantly greater if the authors had been given access to the results of unpublished cloning trials. (See "Buyers Beware: Pet Cloning Is Not for Pet Lovers.")

While the mortality rate of donor cats and surrogate mothers is a tightly guarded trade secret, it is impossible to believe that their lives could be anything other than pure hell. First of all, DNA must be collected from them. Although obtaining it from skin cells is the least invasive way of getting it, there are more invasive procedures as well.

Secondly, hysterectomies are performed on female cats in order to collect occytes. The fused embryos must them be surgically implanted in surrogate cats and powerful hormones administered in order to jumpstart their reproductive cycles.

Finally, since clones tend to be significantly larger than normal kittens, the mother cats must be cut open and their kittens surgically removed.

Even those clones that do survive tend to age far more rapidly than normal kittens due to a shortening of their chromosomes caused by the cloning process itself. The newborns additionally are prone to developmental abnormalities, diseases, compromised immune systems, and higher rates of infection.

It therefore readily can be seen that everything Dresser had to say about Mr. Green Genes was a pure fabrication. Although he looks relatively healthy at the moment, his sojourn on this earth is destined to be a brief one plagued by all sorts of maladies. More to the point, the witless Robach should have asked Dresser how many cats she had killed in the production of Mr. Green Genes.

Despite what Gomez said, it is highly unlikely that he ever will be allowed to retire. Rather, he is destined to spend his entire life in a laboratory being manipulated and used to impregnate other cats. Should he prove to be either infertile or his health deteriorate, it is hard to imagine either Dresser or Gomez hesitating to sign his death warrant.

Tant pis, that is a best case scenario. Since ACRES is so anxious to breed him, that would seem to imply that his DNA already has been further manipulated so as to cause him to develop some hideous disease. After all, fluorescent cats per se are of limited value to vivisectors.

The second recent scientific breakthrough that has led to cats being treated as horribly as lab mice was the discovery of green fluorescent proteins (GFP) in jellyfish and red fluorescent proteins (RFP) in corals. Only last month Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work with GFP. (See Cat Defender post of October 20, 2008 entitled "Swedish Academy Bestows Its 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Yet Another Trio of Vivisectors Whose Discoveries Are Maiming and Killing Cats.")

These proteins are thus fused with deadly diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, and then cloned into cats and other animals. Because they glow in the dark, researchers are able to immediately determine not only what cells and tissues the diseases have invaded but also if they have been passed down to naturally-bred offspring.

Although Mr. Green Genes has been hailed as the first green fluorescent cat produced in the United States, scientists at Gyeongsang University in Jinju produced a Turkish Angora that glowed red in the dark in early 2007. (See photo above.) That cat was later killed off in order that the researchers could perform a necropsy on it.

Lead researcher Kong Il-keun gave a portent of what was to come when he boasted to The Independent on January 2, 2008, "The technology used to produce cloned cats with manipulated genes can be applied to clone animals suffering from the same diseases as humans." (See "Bizarre Experiments: Why Did They Do That?" and Cat Defender post of February 1, 2008 entitled "Cats Are Destined to Be Treated as Horribly as Lab Mice Now That Vivisectors Are Able to Clone Them with Altered Genes.") Mr. Green Genes therefore is the embodiment of Kong's prediction.

The third development that is destined to lead to untold feline suffering was the decoding of the feline genome by a gaggle of researchers affiliated with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland. (See Cat Defender post of December 5, 2007 entitled "Decoding the Feline Genome Provides Vivisectors with Thousands of New Excuses to Continue Torturing Cats in the Course of Their Bogus Research.")

"The domestic cat was included in this mammalian genome set mainly to stimulate genome research on a species that provides a large number of important human medical models," Joan U. Pontius and her colleagues wrote in volume seventeen, number eleven of Genome Research on November 1, 2007. (See "Initial Sequence and Comparative Analysis of the Cat Genome.") "Cats, like dogs, enjoy extensive veterinary medical surveillance that has described two-hundred genetic diseases analogous to human disorders."

As counterintuitive as it may sound, simply taking cats and dogs to the vet is costing millions of their cousins their lives because data collected during these visits is in turn peddled to vivisectors. Moreover, the same cruel fate that now has been bestowed upon cats and dogs awaits at least another two dozen mammals who also have had the secrets of their genetic makeup unraveled by NCI.

More specifically, decoding the feline genome has allowed scientists to identify several hundred thousand genetic variants which they claim can be used to determine the genetic basis of more than two-hundred-fifty hereditary diseases afflicting both cats and humans. In addition to cystic fibrosis, researchers plan on cutting up cats in order to study, inter alia, diabetes, rotavirus, poxvirus, herpes, Q-fever, chlamydiosis, AIDS, hemophilia, Lupus, and retinitis pigmentosa. Even national security spooks are intrigued by the fact that cats are immune to anthrax.

The cat who had her DNA decoded by researchers at the University of Missouri at Columbia was a four-year-old, inbred Abyssinian named Cinnamon who suffered from retinitis pigmentosa. (See photo above.) From this research, scientists were able to isolate the gene responsible for the disease and are now implanting silicon chips in the eyes of a colony of captive cats.

Although the researchers boast that this development one day will benefit humans, they are conspicuously silent as to how it is going to help cats. (See Journal of Hereditary, volume ninety-eight, number 3, May 16, 2007, "Mutation in CEP290 Discovered for Cat Model of Human Retinal Degeneration" and the Daily Telegraph, November 1, 2007, "Cinnamon the Cat Could Offer Hope to the Blind.")

Even if a cure could be found for feline blindness, the pain and cost of such surgery would have to be weighed against the fact that cats lead such terribly short lives. Moreover, it is morally indefensible to allow scientists to clone blind cats just so that vivisectors can imprison them in their laboratories and manipulate them at will.

In spite of all the suffering and deaths that this development is bound to engender, the researchers' work has been funded and endorsed by such supposedly feline-friendly groups as the Winn Feline Foundation, the Cat Fanciers' Association, and Gloria Lauris of Egyptian Mau Rescue. (See Genomics, volume 91, issue 1, January 2008, "The Ascent of Cat Breeds: Genetic Evaluations of Breeds and Worldwide Random-Bred Populations" and Cat Defender post of April 13, 2006 entitled "Once Worshiped as Gods, Maus Are Now Being Poisoned to Death by Egyptian Authorities.")

"This is new and very useful information," Susan Little of the Winn Feline Foundation gushed to the Washington Post on March 17th. (See "On the Trail of the Cat, Scientists Find Surprises.") "It helps improve the ability of breeders to reduce the prevalence of disease by developing a healthy breeding program. It's extremely important."

With shelters, animal control, and veterinarians in the United States exterminating an estimated fifteen million unwanted cats each year and millions more living on the street, the last thing that this world needs is more purebred cats. Besides, purebreds are subject to so many genetic abnormalities that the only humane solution is to put a stop to the inbreeding.

Taken all together, advances made in cloning, the development of fluorescent proteins, and the unraveling of the mysteries of the feline genome have opened up a Pandora's box of horrors for cats. With these tools at their disposal, there will not be any end to the crimes that vivisectors are destined to commit against cats.

Appealing to the scientific community to respect life and to stop torturing and killing cats is a total waste of time. Neither the petit fait that the results of animal tests are seldom applicable to humans nor the immorality of their actions faze them the least little bit. As far as they are concerned, torturing and killing cats is not only profitable but a privilege of their profession.

Professor Charles R. Magel summed up rather well how their twisted minds operate when he once wrote: "Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals and the answer is: 'Because the animals are like us.' Ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the animals are not like us.' Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction." Quite obviously, individuals who think and behave as they do are beyond all redemption.

Much the same can be said for all politicians and the capitalist media. Even many animal rights groups either do not care or, worst still, are in cahoots with the killers and abusers.

The general public should care, especially since eugenics is just around the bend, but it does not. There are hundreds of millions of cat-lovers around the world but they cannot be depended upon to take action. This has been demonstrated writ large by the willingness of many of them to either abandon their companions or to dump them at shelters simply because of the economic downturn.

Consequently, the time has arrived for more responsible individuals and groups to take far more drastic action in order to stop the abuse and killing.

Photos: MSNBC (set of the Today Show), ACRES (Mr. Green Genes), Gyeongsang National University (red fluorescent Angora), and Kristina Narfstrom of the University of Missouri at Columbia (Cinnamon).