Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Animal experimentation is situated at the end of a moral continuum, in which steps
like a large-scale banning of recreational fishing and moral vegetarianism morally pre-
cede the termination of vivisection. These lighter stages have not even begun on a
social scale. Stopping animal research should morally and logically be the last stop
on a long road, and the suspicion that some of those who oppose it have not under-
taken personal measures of protest against less important reasons for animal exploita-
tion suggests that nonmoral motives play a strong part in antivivisection sentiment.
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Proresearch literature speculates that antiscience and antiestablishment feelings animate
antivivisectionist protest, and this may explain why scientists and their laboratories
have been attacked in various places throughout the world, but farmers and abattoir
owners remain outside the pale of the more violent sides of liberationist action. I am
obviously not advocating bombing factory-farms to create consistency within the pro-
animal movement. But the anomaly of making scientists rather than your next-door,
meat-consuming family the prime targets—your average meat-consuming neighbor
commissions the killing of many more animals than does your average experimental
scientist, and she is doing so for far less reason—indicates complex motivation in an-
tivivisection thought, which does not necessarily cohere with the narrowly moral un-
derpinnings of pro-animal protest. If social policy follows moral soundness, abattoirs
should be shut down before laboratories.
To anticipate objections to what I have just said, I am not envisaging moral pro-
gress as a neatly structured movement, flowing logically from one step to the next.
Nor am I deflating my previous attempts at refuting the justifications of research, or
playing into the hands of supporters of research by allowing them to say that we
should morally wait until society at large endorses moral vegetarianism. I am also, I
believe, not misperceiving the strategic goal of beginning with the hardest case for
animal liberation, enlisting the prestige of science into the battle over animal reform,
or belittling the killing of more than forty million animals a year. I am instead en-
dorsing what appears to me to be a viable strategic stance that acknowledges that it
would take a long time for society to unshackle itself from present exploitative prac-
tices. The primary strategic focus of liberation should at present be banning killing
and exploitation for trivial ends. Managing that, in this century, would in itself be a
tremendous achievement for liberationists. The research community can even be enlis-
ted to promote such a goal rather than being alienated from it, because it is precisely
researchers' insistence on the worthiness of their causes for sacrificing animals that
should lead them to condemn so many unworthy reasons for killing animals.
Quadruple-R thinking (including rehabilitation) can pave the way to recognizing that
“replacement” not only takes place in the laboratory but relates to one's nutrition as
well.
