The Republican rush is on. This country can’t move any further to the right without falling off the political spectrum. The House. The Senate. Judges. Everywhere. I can’t even dream about me and Cameron Diaz on a desert island without Hope Taft popping in to chaperone.

So I read the newspaper, a little depressed, to see what Taft and Bush and the rest of the Republicans are cooking up, and, wait a second, what’s this?

“Forty-two cats were killed” by Ohio State medical facilities doing HIV and cell research. A spokesman for the protestors said the cats, who the doctors “binge” on meth, undergo “unnecessary cruelty.”

I personally don’t know if the treatment was harsh; I didn’t ask them. The cats, unfortunately, were unavailable for comment.

But sure – joking aside – the treatment of the cats may be, in reality, actually harsh. Maybe this treatment is wrong. I’m not down with all the philosophy about the great chain of being, or whatever other system of “logic” is used to justify human domination over everything in the environment. Perhaps people do have a duty to be somewhat responsible to other animals.

However, that doesn’t mean one should substitute beer for milk. Nor should they stop eating meat (the food chain seems to have been working pretty well for the last billion or so years). It sure as hell doesn’t mean you should stop a medical program from using a handful of cats to cure diseases that are destroying millions of people around the world.

I guess my argument boils down to straight economic efficiency: take the quickest route to a cure with the least expenditure of life possible. It seems like 42 stray cats is a small price to pay for a cure for HIV – one of the largest killers of people in the world, and a disease that soaks up a large portion of national and international resources.

Saving these cats in the whirlwind of social problems is about as important as trying to save a stamp collection from a tornado.

The studies at OSU may be evident of a larger trend of animal rights-infringements countrywide. This issue is only one small part in a much larger scheme of social problems here and abroad.

This country can barely take any positive action to help its minorities or its impoverished, the sick or the elderly. Now we have to worry about a handful of cats in a lab trying to cure a disease affecting millions of people worldwide?

This trend of animal testing, though somewhat unfortunate for cats right now, might actually help animals in the long run. The current medical agenda has taken a seat in front of so many other social concerns in the past decade, especially in the conservative-controlled era we’re stuck in now. It’s one of the few that governments have tried to support.

Millions of dollars, thousands of man-hours and countless scientific programs have been consumed by efforts to cure the major diseases, much of it by the major medical companies currently coddled and sheltered by the corporation-friendly Taft-Bush regime. This medical emphasis comes at the expense of other social programs – programs that aren’t connected largely to big business – ones that don’t receive government assistance.

So, really, the sooner cures for diseases are found, the sooner resources could be used on other things, such as the environment, cleaner fuels, animal welfare that right now are taking a back seat to curing medical problems. Possibly, the sooner the cure is found, the sooner these cats can go on living unharmed.

For now, to you make an omelet, you still have to break a few eggs.

John Ross is a junior in comparative studies and can be reached for comment at [email protected].