8.23.14 Q + AL start conquest of OZ with sold out show

BrianMaycom ‏@brianmaycom 1h
BRIAN'S SOAPBOX: "ICE BUCKET FALLOUT - AND ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION... Bri" @drbrianmay More bit.ly/1mBWc0V


**Sun 24 Aug 14**
ICE BUCKET FALLOUT - AND ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION

Thanks for all your congratulatory messages over my performance for the ice bucket challenge.

Well, I'm full of admiration for the way this campaign was set up …

It really has lit a fire around the world which has spread very quickly - largely, of course, because it's fun, but also everyone, including me, has felt it was a great cause to get behind. A great friend of ours recently died of Lou Gehrig's Disease - Eric Lowen. Some of you may remember the track I recorded with Lynn Carey Saylor for him - and with him - his song We Believe, not long before he died of this horrible, incurable wasting disease; so I had a personal reason for getting involved with ice buckets.

Of course I jumped in and got wet - I like a challenge.

But I'm now in an uncomfortable spot. As a campaigner for animals, every bit of information gets to me.

My contribution to the ALS campaign is already out there, but I now realise that ALS is an experimenter on animals.

Not only on animals .. but apparently, I am told, on primates - which to me is one of the most abhorrent aspects of laboratory animal 'use', and perhaps the hardest to justify.

It's been demonstrated very clearly (for example, by the Hadwen Trust) now that medical results obtained by experiments on animals are not only hideously cruel and morally indefensible, but often dangerously misleading as well (Thalidomide being a prime example). More and more, ways are being found to substitute difference science to supersede the animal-based methods - methods which are also more rigorous and more effective in advancing knowledge towards cures for human illnesses.

So now I have a new challenge - to find my way through that jungle.

ALS's publicists have done incredibly well lighting that fire of awareness. And of course it IS a good cause.

But now I might have to try lighting another fire …

Cheers

Bri