Oxford University are enthusiastic about selling themselves as a centre of academic excellence. Yet academia and learning seem to have been displaced by cold financial considerations, and making money is something Oxford University are very good at.Before you decide to visit the city of ‘dreaming spires’or attend Oxford University, take a closer look at what you will be supporting with your money.

Real life inside an Oxford Laboratory

‘Felix’ was a macaque monkey who was tortured for one entire year by vivisector Tipu Aziz. While excellent alternative research methods exist,Felix was but one of countless numbers of sentient beings that continue to suffer and die inside Oxford laboratories every year for no reason other than greed.

Felix was subjected to the standard method employed to coerce a monkey into compliance: starvation. He had the top of his skull sliced off, an extremely painful procedure. Electrodes were forced into his brain and then he was fitted with a cranial chamber. He suffered alone in his barren cage until the day his torturers had finished with him; the day they put him to death.

The mind of a vivisector

In November 2004 Thames Valley Police investigated an Oxford University professor following claims that a monkey was kept alive, in pain, with an incurable brain infection after an experiment. Vivisectors refused to put her down on the grounds that she was “an asset”. It had to be escalated to a Home Office Inspector before the monkey was put down. Not surprisingly, the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute.

George was a wild-caught macaque monkey who was blinded in experiments two years later by this same professor who merrily related to a group of students that, once blinded, part of the experiment then included taking George out into the University Park. Just how this action served the experiment, or for that matter, how this experiment served humanity we will never know. We can, however, make reasonable conclusions about how these experiments serve the egos and coffers of the people who perpetrate them.

Morbid Curiosity = Grant Money

In 2006 a team of researchers in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University surgically damaged the brains of 9 macaque monkeys and recorded their responses to various threatening situations, including exposure to rubber snakes and the stares of unfamiliar human faces. Similar previous experiments conducted by the same researchers had shown that the greater the brain damage, the less sociable the monkeys became. Not only was this experiment redundant, but it yielded nothing apart from a tacit admission by the team about the lack of relevance of their own research. They stated that the equivalent tests given to human subjects (using noninvasive scanning equipment) were considerably more complex than those possible in monkeys.^[1]

Profits at all costs

The suffering and cruelty are not limited to the innocent animal victims at Oxford. In the UK, the “Victor” trial of Vioxx began in 2000, despite widely available data on fatalities in the US. One of the principal organisers of the trial was a prominent professor who was appointed to his present position at Oxford in 2001. This professor was also the leading investigator. Furthermore, the institution that was assigned the responsibility of organising the trial was Oxford University. It appears our professor was rewarded with a plum position for putting this work Oxford University’s way. The trial resulted in the deaths of 2000 innocent human victims, yet Oxford has never even apologised.

Suffering, Cruelty, Corruption, Murder, and Greed: Is this really what you want to support?

Say NO to the city that supports corruption and cruelty. BOYCOTT OXFORD and say YES to a science based on compassion that actually works.

Click here to let Oxford know that you are boycotting the city while it remains
a place of animal abuse by contacting the local tourist information centre

 

 

---

1. Rudebeck M, Buckley MJ, Walton ME, Rushworth MFS. Science 2006; 313:1310-1312. ‘A role for the macaque anterior cingulate gyrus in social valuation.’