KILLING FOR KNOWLEDGE - Ethics and the Beast - page 67

Strategic prudence should not be confused with moral analysis. I strived to show
why experiments cannot be morally excused. But, at least for me, what follows from
such a result is not a tooth-and-nail battle aimed at the ceasing of all vivisection. It
is seldom realized that consistently fighting such a battle could demand paying a
saintly personal price, since it may require giving up on the benefits of past and fu-
ture animal research (avoiding various vaccines, open-heart surgery, most drugs, nu-
merous—if not all—household chemicals). Otherwise, one's consumption of such
goods is to benefit from a wrong. 40 Walking down the antivivisection road consist-
ently may then substantially diminish the scope of liberationism by turning it into an
unlivable mode of protest, thus damaging animals in the long run. The time may
come when animal-using laboratories will become proper targets for change. That
time is not here yet.
This does not mean that laboratories should not be severely monitored. Indeed, pro-
animalists should work assiduously to establish and enforce ethical regulations on re-
search, create substantial fund allocations to alternatives, promote routine work with
now-available international data banks presenting updated information on validated al-
ternatives, as well as improve these data banks. 41 As for more robust forms of
protest, we are perhaps ready for blanket banning of experimentation on some of the
higher species and some variants of basic research. 42 We may be ready to eliminate
all teaching-related killing of animals, using the alternatives that are already available
for these. 43 We are beginning to ban the testing of some products on animals (cos-
metics and tobacco). But we are not ready for anything more ambitious. If some
think that such remarks are defeatist, so be it. Stopping all animal experimentation is
a morally correct objective, but, for the time being, aim lower.
At the same time, I am not claiming that we can dispense with the opposition to
research. I see two valid practical routes for opposition: the first is fighting to ban all
experiments. The second is less dramatic and exciting yet might well be a more ef-
fective intervention on behalf of animals: join hands with the worldwide attempt to
reduce the number of animal experiments, to diminish animal pain in experiments that
are carried out, and to rehabilitate animals that survive nonterminal experiments.
These two options seem to be mutually exclusive: advancing the second (e.g., by par-
ticipating in an ethical committee) implies (rightly or wrongly) acceptance of the
premises that some experiments need to be conducted, and this contradicts the as-
sumption that all animal experiments are morally wrong, the assumption animating the
first option of actively fighting to stop all experiments. Moreover, by lending one's
name as a pro-animal activist to the authorization of experiments, one appears to be,
in effect, publicly providing a moral stamp of approval to a practice that one op-
poses.