"Filthy Beast"

In his cream-colored Beverly Hills mansion, ailing old (87) Publisher William Randolph Hearst spotted a story in his Los Angeles Examiner that set his antivivisectionist blood aboil. Los Angeles medical researchers, he read, were getting stray animals from the city pound under a wartime ordinance permitting their use for "military purposes," and were using them for medical experiments. Hearst set the Examiner off in full cry. With banner headlines and cartoons depicting the "horrors" of vivisection, the Examiner demanded that the ordinance be repealed and that all vivisection in the area be stopped.

The first reaction came from the U.S. Navy. Commander R. J. Trauger, chief of U.S. Navy Research at Los Angeles, soberly warned a press conference that experiments on dogs at the University of Southern California were "essential to national defense." They were needed to find methods of protection against atomic radiation and bacteriological warfare, and to determine bodily changes at high airplane speeds.

Wrong Number. To the Examiner, Trauger's warning was new evidence of depravity. It ran full pages of photographs depicting sad-eyed mongrels in various stages of "torture." But last week the Examiner's campaign backfired. On Page One, in a top head adjoining the antivivisection campaign story, the Examiner ran a story hailing a medical discovery made at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital.* The paper had to yank it hastily after discovering that the findings were developed from experiments on dogs. The same day, the Examiner headlined a long-distance interview with the Rev. Carl C. Rasmussen, ex-councilman who had written the wartime dog-pound ordinance. As the Examiner told it, Rasmussen, who was in Des Moines, was "shocked" and "horrified" at the "misuse" of his law. But as Rasmussen told the story, after he hurried to Los Angeles, the Examiner had put a lot of "lies" in his mouth.

Party Line. The Los Angeles Times, well aware that Hearst's new campaign might hamper medical progress, also let out an angry blast at the Examiner: "A curious partnership has been discovered . . . The fanatics who oppose animal experimentation . . . are being joined, and in some part led, by Communists and Communist sympathizers interested in sabotaging national defense . . ."

At midweek, when friends & foes of vivisection converged on Los Angeles' city council, the Rev. Mr. Rasmussen calmly supported the Navy's experiments and the ordinance stood. Nevertheless, at week's end harried Los Angeles doctors were still getting anonymous threats in the mail. Said a typical one: "You dirty, stinking, filthy beast. I would dearly love to beat you to death, as you would a little animal."

*Whose research chief, Dr. Harry Goldblatt, in 1948 was shot at by an infuriated dog lover.

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