Is it ethical deliberately to inflict pain on animals and are such experiments sufficiently reliable?
Sir, Ben Macintyre is to be congratulated for his balanced account of the debate about vivisection that raged between Charles Darwin and Frances Power Cobbe (founder of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, BUAV) in your pages 130 years ago, and its resonance with the debate that still rages today (“Animal rights — and wrongs”, times2, Feb 12).
There are two central issues about animal experiments that sometimes get conflated. First, and most important: is it ethical deliberately to inflict pain and other forms of suffering on animals who do not consent and who will not benefit from the suffering? Second, are such experiments sufficiently reliable anyway, given the physiological differences between species? The reason ethics is the predominant issue is that mere hoped-for benefit does not of itself justify cruel means — if it did, we would experiment non-consensually on people, indisputably a far better scientific model for human conditions.
Darwin would not have claimed that one can both experiment on an animal and at the same time pretend that one is behaving humanely towards that animal, as many pro-vivisectionists do. Of course, one can try to minimise suffering, just as slave-owners and apartheid beneficiaries could act more or less kindly towards slaves and black people. But no one would dream of describing slavery or apartheid as humane. Macintyre is correct to say that Cobbe, a noted social reformer, made the link between various social evils, such as oppression of women, and oppression of laboratory animals — oppression is oppression, whatever guise it appears in.
The EU is considering revising its law on animal experiments. It has a historic opportunity to begin to move science away from its dependence on animals and into humane and more relevant forms of research.
Michelle Thew
Chief Executive, BUAV
Animal rights -Times Online
14-02-2009, 01:32 AM
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