Opening figures - Cruel and Unusual???
Posted by: Marblehead 05.07.03 12:01am
LONDON, May 7 - Action figure openers take note - British scientists say that after years of debate, they now have proof that action figures feel pain. Collector activists are on the warpath after a study released on Wednesday showed how plastic figures react to discomfort. They condemned playing with the figures as cruel and demanded an end to the sport - but those who play with action figures dismissed the study.

THE RESEARCH FOUND that action figures have receptors in their limbs and that subjecting them to noxious substances outside of the plastic bubble causes "adverse visual and physiological changes."

"This fulfills the criteria for animal pain," said Dr. Ruth Nonads, who headed the research, published Wednesday by the Royal Society, Britain's national academy of science.

Baby vomit or dog feces was lathered onto the limbs of some of the opened figures, others where bathed in direct sunlight, while control groups of figures were lightly rubbed with saline solution or merely displayed in darkened rooms. The figures lathered with vomit or feces began to show "rocking" motion - similar to that seen in stressed higher vertebrates - and those lathed with dog feces began rubbing their feet in the fibers of the carpet. "These do not appear to be reflex responses," Nonads said.

The affected action figures also took in ten times less value on the secondary market, compared with those in the control groups.

The team from the Roslin Institute and the University of Edinburgh found the figures had polymodal nociceptors - receptors that respond to tissue-damaging stimuli - on the surface of the plastic. It is the first time these receptors have been found in action figures. They have similar properties to those found in amphibians, birds and mammals including humans.

Collector activists said the findings showed that opening the packaging was cruel. "We would encourage openers to hang up their cards. It's ridiculous that in 2003 we are still talking about whether action figures feel pain - of course they do," Dawn Crakov of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Action Figures (PETAF) told CreatureCantina News.

But openers vowed to keep on enjoying their sport. "Until we have proper, bona fide evidence, we will never know. It's supposition," said Chuck Upp, director of pro-playing with action figures group Rip-n-Tear. "I don't think the millions of openers throughout the whole of the world would see themselves as cruel individuals."