Re: Misleading petition alleges Carleton cryogenically freezes chimps
In last week’s Charlatan, I was horrified to find out that our university was apparently cryogenically freezing chimpanzees.
Usually cryogenic freezing means the person (or chimpanzees in this case) would be frozen once it has reached clinical death. There might be some brain activity, but for all intents and purposes the furry creature is dead.
Carleton was apparently even more cruel. According to a petition, Carleton was actually freezing these chimpanzees while they were still alive, and letting them die a slow, painful, and very cold death.
Except they weren’t. The whole petition was as made up as my middle school girlfriend.
When the reporter asked Carleton about their practice of freezing chimpanzees to death, the university said they don’t even have chimpanzees, much less frozen ones. Now, while I, like most journalism students, tend to be skeptical of our benevolent overlords in the university administration, I’m inclined to believe them in this case.
So why am I bringing this up? Simple: the petition was signed by over 2,000 people. These 2,000 people believed that our university kills chimpanzees and then stores them in really cold metal tubes.
This is a problem. I can hope that most of those signatures came from people halfway around the world, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it included Carleton students.
There’s two lessons here.
People need to learn how to perform some basic research before putting their name on something. Even if your activism is a lazy as a Facebook like, please do at least one Google search on the topic to see if it’s exactly what you think it is. In fact, you don’t even have to use Google. Bing it, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, whatever. But please don’t just sign your name.
The more important point here is that we need to start taking a bigger interest in our university. If we can be duped into believing there are frozen chimpanzees being stored somewhere on campus, I’m a little afraid of what else we can be convinced of. As Carleton students, we might be the only people in the world who are willing to defend our school.
How can we hope to do that when we don’t even know about the university’s policy on dead chimpanzees?
