Animal Writings

This is my next to last post in this series on vivisection. I wanted to give the subject more than a cursory look, yet I feel like I only scratched the surface.

The vivisection industry is rife with experiments that inflict substantial pain and suffering on animals, ostensibly to find cures for diseases that we largely bring ourselves. Government health agencies spend scant resources on true prevention campaigns, which would produce a wealth of benefits for relatively little cost. Due to inherent differences between species, and the contrived methods by which vivisectors imitate human disease in animals, many if not all animal model exercises are of dubious scientific value. Notwithstanding the questionable reliability (if not proven unreliability) of animal models, a relatively tiny portion of health research funds are allocated to developing non-animal alternatives.

Many animal experiments do not even pretend to be an effort to cure AIDS or heart disease or cancer. They are studying yogurt-tasting preferences, or trying to induce gayness in sheep, or concocting hideously crude models of PMS. In product testing labs, scientists and staff pour caustic chemicals into the skin and eyes of restrained animals—for profit, not because of scientific or regulatory reasons.

When we treat animals—sentient beings with profound interests, an intense will to live, and an enormous capacity for suffering—as expendable trash, to make a buck, or out of moral laziness, or due to apathy, something is brazenly wrong with society.

The vast majority of animals used in vivisection labs are killed at the end of the experiments in which they are used, and are not protected by any animal welfare laws. Moreover, the welfare regulations that do cover some animals are filled with loopholes and are regularly flaunted or ignored. Enforcement is lax, and penalties are rare and usually amount to a slap on the wrist. Perhaps this is not surprising considering that the agency responsible for regulating animal welfare laws is one of the world's biggest users of animal experiments and furthermore exempts themselves from their own laws.

Scientists in vivisection labs lock monkeys in restraining devices and deprive them of anything to drink for up to 22 hours and do not consider that to cause pain or distress. They repeatedly get away with such callous, ignorant stunts. (If those things were done to them, I'm sure they'd have a different view.) Examples of severe, gratuitous cruelty and negligence in vivisection labs—including hitting, throwing, and yelling at frightened animals who are in pain and shock—are frighteningly easy to find. So are incidences in which animals go crazy from their prolonged confinement and monotony.

The truth of what goes on in vivisection labs is almost completely hidden from the public. We are dependent on undercover animal rights investigators to document the horrid realities of these places.

The vivisection lobby takes credit for cures in the past in which animal experiments played non-causal or superficial roles, or were, in some cases, an impediment to medical advancement. They fight all animal welfare legislation, and have done so for decades. They use propaganda that preys on the fears and feeling of helplessness that many people have in the face of debilitating and deadly disease, and through concerted lobbying efforts and influence over government, they control information and manipulate emotions to assure continued taxpayer funding and to discourage or distract from challenging questions about the nature, need, and ethics of vivisection. Criticism is usually responded to with a combination of denial, attacks on the messengers, alarmist ultimatum-like threats about what will happen if we don't experiment on animals, and grand self-congratulatory pronouncements—if not outright lies—about the wonderful, disease-free world that awaits us if we lock up, infect, burn, mutilate, torture, and kill another billion animals or so—mostly in secret chambers where no one outside can see what's really happening.

Remember, this is an industry that could not even show that smoking causes cancer—and thus perhaps caused millions of humans to suffer and die. It is an industry that has tortured baby monkeys and kittens for decades to "prove" the obvious: that babies need their mothers. It is an industry in which scientists have amputated the tongues of captive dogs because they did not want to be bothered by the dogs' barking. It was in defense of vivisection that Descartes issued one of the most obscenely ignorant justifications for torturing animals: He claimed that animals were mere automatons, incapable of pain and suffering, whose screams when they were nailed to boards and cut open while fully conscious amounted to no more than mechanical noises—like the gears of a clock. His fellow vivisectors went along with that. Not until the last few years has the vivisection industry acknowledged that animals have emotions. Perhaps if they'd put down their clipboards and spend one day in an animal shelter or sanctuary they could learn this and other basic truths.

It is impossible to say which form of institutionalized animal abuse is most chilling. Vivisection ranks up there. Some of the suffering inflicted on animals bred and enslaved by the industry are bizarre and macabre. When not being experimented on, animals may spend decades in small solitary prisons. Can you imagine what kind of horrible existence that is? Each day you do virtually nothing at all and cannot escape the confines of your tiny cell. Would vivisectors consent to being treated like they treat their animals if some powerful alien beings wanted to experiment on us? In fact, would the vivisectors volunteer to be subjects, since they so highly tout the essentialness and valor of harming and killing "lesser" beings for the promise of some gain for "superior" beings? If vivisectors had to trade places with their victims, the practice would end in a couple od weeks, and former vivisectors would suddenly discover all sorts of useful, predictive, and relevant non-animal methodologies.

Of course, when the shoe's on the other foot—when you're the one being imprisoned, tortured, and killed for the benefit of your captors, who consider themselves justified in treating you this way because of their superiority—the concepts of "superior" and "inferior" may be seen in quite a different light. Does "superior" mean the ability to do abstract reasoning? If so, we could certainly stratify humans into "superior" and "inferior" categories. Oops, I forgot we've done that throughout history. Does being classified as "inferior" reduce you to slave status? Or to disposable thing status? Perhaps instead of picking self-serving criteria for "superior"—which almost always amounts to nothing more than unconvincing defenses for "might makes right"—perhaps we should use criteria such as the ability to live in peace with the earth and other beings. On that scale, neither we nor our theoretical alien captors rate very highly. Perhaps the first step in being "superior" is to care about helping others and avoiding harming them rather than caring about whether you're superior.

I think I understand the strategy of many animal activists to concentrate almost entirely on farmed animals and promoting vegan diets: Since around 99 percent of animals bred and killed at the behest of humans live and die in the animal agriculture industry, by getting people to change their diets, we can save the most number of animals and reduce human-caused animal suffering most quickly. I have no qualms with that, and for the most part I follow that same strategy.

But I can't ignore individuals who are suffering and being killed just because they're not in the category at the front of the line. The monkey wasting away alone in a tiny cage in a vivisection lab suffers as intensely as the sow stuck in a maddeningly tiny gestation crate. Each individual's pain and suffering is overwhelmingly important to them. I feel that way with humans, too. I understand attending to crises that affect a great number of people, such as populations starving from drought, war, or corrupt despotic governments, or victims of massive natural disasters that impact population centers. But I can't forget about the political prisoner rotting in a concrete cell in some small, little-known (to us) country. I can't, in essence, say to him or her, "We'll get to you later, once we're done fixing the situations in Darfur and the Mideast."

Besides, all forms of oppression and exploitation are linked. The psychological and sociological factors that compel persons to dominate and exploit others, and to deceive themselves and concoct unconvincing rationalizations for committing avoidable harm, can be manifested in any number of ways and may affect victims across species. If we become more humble and less greedy, establish a sympathetic bond with other sentient beings, and learn how to curtail our more violent urges, the whole world and every being in it will benefit.

To (almost) end this, series, I would recommend reading pattrice jones' essay, "Against Vivisection", on vivisection's insidious reach, in which she explains how the institution infects society as a whole.

The last post in the series will offer a glimmer of hope.

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"I abhor vivisection. It should at least be curbed. Better, it should be abolished. I know of no achievement through vivisection, no scientific discovery, that could not have been obtained without such barbarism and cruelty. The whole thing is evil."

-- Dr. Charles Mayo, founder of the Mayo Clinic

Labels: animal model, vivisection