ANIMAL RESEARCH
This page condenses some of the arguments found on the main page http://animalvegfaq.tripod.com
It may be useful for students writing essays or just as a summary of major arguments found on this page.
These are arguments I have used over the years in exchanges with research
proponents and scientists. It is common for anti-vivisectionists to cite studies
that show how dangerous and useless nonhuman animal research is for human
medicine. I think this can be a bad strategy, especially if it is your main
argument. Although there is definitely enormous amounts of fraud, this approach
assumes that an audience member is going to trust an animal rights activists to
care about human health more than the researcher who is represented by the side
that supplies drugs and treatments. Its a steep hill to climb-and leads to he
said/she said kind of discussions which will get too technical for the audience
to understand. The approach below requires no textbook citations. Researchers
and pro vivisection supporters HATE this kind of argument. They can't bog the
discussion down or hide from its logic.
Arguments Against ANIMAL RESEARCH
1)It is a perversion of altruism and compassion--you attempt to heal Peter by
torturing and killing Paul. It is like trying to help a homeless man by kicking
a family out of their house, beating them to death and moving the former in
(except that finding a home for the homeless man is a sure thing--animal
researchers have been trying to cure cancer for hundreds of years without
success). The fact that the number one answer to criticism of animal research is
a citation of alleged benefits proves that animal researchers lack a common
sense understanding of morality and ethics--since we wouldn't allow murderers or
thieves to cite the benefits they or their family attain from their actions to
justify murder or theft.
2)It is a medical fraud--if you wouldn't think it is rational to find a cure for
diseases in giraffes by experimenting on elephants why would you think it is
rational to cure disease in humans by using mice, rats, dogs or chimps? Animal
research is big business (from cage manufacturers to science grant applicants),
and scientists have a vested interest in conjuring up new experiments to keep
their paychecks, while telling the public that the research is important and a
"breakthrough." (If you think animal researchers are strictly motivated by
compassion, how many new drugs they develop can you get for free?) Pagan priests
sacrificed animals and read their entrails to encourage the hope and health of
society (a good harvest, easy childbirth). Those that opposed it endangered
society by angering the gods. Today, animal researchers claim that if nonhuman
animal research stopped, the world would descend into a hell of disease and
misery (without explaining why society and culture endured even during the
Medieval plague. By their logic, humans should have been extinct eons ago, plus
it grossly exaggerates the power of medicine since humans continue to die from
disease--including scientists). Animal researchers promote the view that life
works according to a quasi-Darwinian "Great Chain of Being" hierarchy where
animals follow a ladder of complexity--starting with worms and ending with
humanity, and that you can take them apart and reassemble them as easily as a
jigsaw puzzle. If animal research is necessary for producing safe drugs and
treatments why then do we need clinical trials on humans? Why does Pfizer have
to conduct medical trials in Africa? Why do drugs like Thalidomide get pulled
after being shown to be safe in nonhuman animals? If one had a choice between a
drug tested only on rats or chimps, and a drug tested only on humans, which
would you deem safer for people? The answer determines one's belief in the
importance on nonhuman animals in research. The more recent claims that genetic
engineering can alter the physiology of nonhuman animals so they are better
models for human research, which led to a renewed explosion in vivisection
experiments, also exploits public ignorance, since it requires faith that
scientists understand Nature so well that they can predict how the physiology of
other species will react to the altered genetics. But even if they could turn a
nonhuman into a perfect copy of human anatomy with the same responses to
chemicals, the torture and death that would be required to reach such a point
could not be justified by the discriminatory ethical arguments based on the
false belief in human supremacy as mentioned below.
3)Animal research treats nonhuman animals in ways that would be considered an
atrocity if done to even the most despised criminal in history--and yet,
nonhuman animals commit no crimes. Why do they deserve such treatment?
4)If finding a cure for disease is so important, why aren't scientists and
patients advocating the use of criminals or volunteers in medical experiments?
Humans are the best and safest model for research, and we send healthy people
off to be maimed and killed in wars for natural resources, religion and
political ideology, and yet the war against cancer is only considered of dire
importance when it comes to the discussion of abolishing nonhuman animals in
research.
5) Researchers and their proponents say animal rights activists can't protest
animal research if they have benefited from research that has been linked to
animal research experiments. But they ignore that research on humans against
their consent has also been done and the research preserved for the greater
good-why don't they make the same demands of human rights activists? Double
standards.
6)Researchers say they need to use nonhuman animals for research because they
are like us--and yet they say they deserve no rights because they are not like
us. This highlights the real issue--the motivation for animal research beyond
money is an arrogant belief that humans as a species are superior in value to
all other life, based upon arbitrary, non-absolute and subjective criteria
conveniently determined by those who stand to benefit from the discrimination
and exploitation. The same reasoning was used by James Marion Sims, former
president of the American Medical Association, to experiment on black slaves (a
bronze statue of him stands in NY's Central Park) and by Nazi doctors to justify
their experiments.
Further reading on how we are all using research done on unsuspecting humans.
Taken from:
http://www.micahbooks.com/readingroom/Nazisandanimalresearch.html "In
1987, the Supreme Court heard a case in which a U.S. soldier sued the government
for having used him as a test case for LSD experiments, without his knowledge
(Stanley vs. The United States). The court voted 5 to 4 against the victim. For
a recent review of experiments conducted on human beings in the U.S., without
their informed consent, see Clouds of Secrecy: The Army's Germ Warfare Tests
over Populated Areas, by Leonard A. Cole, Subjected to Science, by Susan Lederer,
Johns Hopkins Press (This books studies experimentation on human beings between
the two world wars); and Stranger at The Bedside by David J. Rothman, which
studies this problem in the period after the Second World War. There are many
more books on this subject. Many of them can be found on the Internet, under
"Human Experimentation," or at Amazon.com, under the same heading."
Pfizer experiments in Africa: July 1, 2002 issue of The Nation. Globalizing
Clinical Research: Big Pharma Tries Out First World Drugs on Unsuspecting Third
World Patients by Sonia Shaw.
This is a summary of a non Singer or Regan formula for asserting nonhuman rights
status (also on main page). I think the Sentience/Speciesism argument approach
should be tossed to the trash can as it leaves too many weak spots.
Anti-Human Supremacy Ethical Argument for Nonhuman Rights aka the Misanthrope
Animal Rights Argument
Those who believe in a moral code of universal human rights but deny
extending rights to nonhumans have two problems. The criteria(s) they use to
justify this discrimination (faculty of reason, a soul, divine or evolutionary
favor, moral reciprocity, survival of the fittest, individual selfishness, a
bundle of characteristics or vaguely defined ones etc.) cannot be proven to be
possessed by all humans or lacking in all nonhumans. i.e. some humans are more
intelligent than others, some nonhumans are more rational than some humans,
humans can and do willfully break laws and yet the most hated of criminals are
regarded as more deserving of care and respect than the most innocent of beings.
Secondly, the importance of such criteria can be doubted-- shown not to be
objective absolute truth, but subjective arbitrary criteria conveniently
determined by those who stand to benefit from the discrimination they wish to
justify. Nature(or invisible deities), through environmental phenomenon,
weather, earthquakes, and the actions of other human beings, cannot be shown to
care or favor humans over other lifeforms as an absolute objective fact. This
subjectivity means that someone who may discriminate against other humans (which
happens despite the laws and philosophy designed to curb such incidents) using
criteria that is just as subjective (skin colour, gender, class, religion,
survival of the fittest, individual selfishness, etc) cannot be effectively
condemned by a human rights advocate who denies rights to nonhumans, since both
are discriminating according to subjective criteria of value they deem to be
important. Pragmatic appeals to self-interest and the Golden Rule are also
dubious, since a dictator or criminal may exploit and kill and never need to
care about the rights of others or face prosecution, and a man living on one
side of the globe does not necessarily have a practical reason to care what
happens to humans in another far away country.
The only way for a human rights advocate to consistently argue that one ought to
have systemic universal human rights and an ethical code based upon this idea is
to extend the concept of fairness and justice to nonhumans as much as possible.
Because humans develop ethical codes to govern human behavior, and nonhumans do
not appear to employ or require such codes in their social interactions, they
benefit from the consistency requirement in human concepts of fairness and
justice without needing to reciprocate. To expect them to adhere to human moral
contracts in order to be eligible for moral regard is like expecting a blind man
to be able to read and then punishing him for not doing so. That moral regard
may not be possible or practical in all situations due to particular factors
(such as scale or absentmindedness or the inability to be perfect), but since
the same is true of human relations with other humans, it does not invalidate
the merits of the argument or provide a loophole to justify systemic
exploitation of nonhuman lifeforms (since one could then justify the same for
humans).
Every argument put forth to defend exploitation assumes human superiority as a
given, and conveniently ignores the reality of human predation upon other human
beings. This approach applies equally to theists and secularists, and any human
society that can articulate a belief in supremacy and uses it to systematically
discriminate (against humans or nonhumans).
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