Species Or Specimen

Ruarc Gahan gives his views on Vivisection to Business Health


Vivisection is using live animals for laboratory experiments that are potentially painful or damaging. Dr Samuel Johnson, writing in the eighteenth century, described vivisection as the work of "a race of men that have practiced tortures without pity and related them without shame, and are yet suffered to erect their heads among human beings."

But maybe they do feel some shame, for, far from erecting their heads, they usually keep them well down. Letters in the press opposing vivisection never get any response, and a fairly strong ethical case against animal experiments which the Irish Times published last December didn't elicit a squeak from any practitioner of vivisection.

Benefits to Humanity?
When vivisectionists do attempt to defend what they are doing, they usually list benefits to humanity that (they allege) have been obtained through experiments on animals. Sometimes, attempting to wrong-foot the animal rights camp, they add that veterinary medicine has also benefited.

In all of this they fail to answer the fundamental ethical objection to vivisection, viz. that it is categorically wrong to subject any creatures, human or other, to experimental procedures that may harm them, without the meaningful consent of those being experimented upon.

Scientists will argue that they have to use animals in the pursuit of medical progress. Supposing this to be true, why don't they use human animals, which could at least give their consent? Since most medical research is done with human welfare in view, humans would obviously provide better models for experiments. Using humans would avoid all the problems created by species differences and the difficulties of extrapolation.

Humans that could be used in experiments potentially painful and/or harmful to themselves fall into two broad categories:
- mature humans of average intelligence who could give meaningful consent but could resist coercion if it were attempted
- and other humans, for example babies, persons with serious mental disability, the senile, etc., who could not give meaningful consent but could be taken advantage of and used for laboratory experiments without such consent.
For present purposes, these are in the same category as non-humans.

Humans in the first group aren't often used because normally they don't offer themselves and wouldn't put up with being used. Humans in the second group aren't used either because, if they were, other humans would rally around and put a stop to it, believing their own species, including the most vulnerable and helpless members of it, to be sacrosanct.

Rats, mice, cats, dogs and all the other creature that are used in experiments, aren't able to speak for themselves and haven't got influential friends in high places. They can't argue their way out of the laboratory or physically escape. As most people don't know what's going on in laboratories, there has been no mass movement against vivisection of the kind that is set to outlaw intensive animal farming and, hopefully, to ban hare coursing and fox hunting.

Why not use humans?
So the scientists, who wouldn't dare se humans, have so far felt quite safe in taking advantage of their power over defenseless animals for the benefit of their own species. And they will even claim that animals don't suffer in laboratory experiments. Well then, humans wouldn't suffer either, so we're back to the question, why not pluck up your courage, scientists and use humans? Ah yes, comes the reply, but you see we usually kill the animals afterwards because we've damaged them. We'd never get away with killing damaged humans - we'd have to repair them instead, which would be impractical as well as uneconomical. (Forgive me for a little facetiousness.)

Very well: if it's deemed acceptable to damage, and then kill, a perfectly healthy animal, would it be right to use your pet? If not, why has your pet got rights superior to those of animals in laboratories? Of course, if a pet owner inflicted intrusive surgery on his perfectly healthy rat (yes people do have pet rats) and then killed it, he'd probably be liable to prosecution. But the scientist aren't prosecuted; they are licensed to cause pain.

Animals in laboratories are subjected to all sorts of barbarities. They are given cancer and the development of their tumours is watched; they are subjected to all sorts of surgical procedures, to deprivations, to force-feeding, to bodily injuries, to injections with different substances, and at the end of it all they are "sacrificed." (Just routinely killed, in case you thought there was some sort of religious connotation.) Here are just a few brief quotations from reports of experiments in the Irish Journal of Medical Science:

• "Mice underwent caecal ligation and puncture and were studied for survival (five days)"
- Which in plain English means that the large intestine of these mice was bound and then punctured and five days later the mice were dead.

• 36 Mice "received Lewis lung carcinoma implants"
- i.e. were given lung cancer. After 10 days some were opened up to see how much the tumour had grown.

• "This study evaluated the effect of hind limb amputation" (mice).

• "Twelve dogs....received 1.3% end-tidal isoflurane. After thoracotomy (operation in which the chest is opened) the descending thoracic aorta (main artery) was cross-clamped for 30 minutes....24 hours later neurological status was assessed by scoring motor function in the hind legs."

So laboratory animals don't suffer? Well, I'm glad I wasn't one of those mice or dogs.

Where do scientists think they get the right to mess about with the bodies of live animals? The answer is clear: by virtue of their power over the animals, they arrogate to themselves the right to abuse their bodies. The vivisector's philosophy is simple: Might is Right. It's the philosophy of bullies and tyrants the world over.

Emotionally Reasoning
Practitioners of vivisection sometimes seek to win sympathy by asking simplistic trick questions. What if your own child was struck by a mortal illness to which a cure might be found by experimenting on live animals? What would you do if you yourself were mortally ill and animal experimentation might lead to a cure? I have no problem dealing with questions like these though there isn't space here. But frankly I've little time for these trick questions: such diversionary tactics are typically resorted to when a case is unsustainable.

Finally, if animals are used in vivisection procedures to achieve medical progress, then this progress is purchased at too high a price. As Bernard Shaw said, "if you cannot attain to knowledge without torturing a dog, then you must do without knowledge." The only animal that can justifiably be used for experiment is the human volunteer. Meanwhile, what the scientists are doing to animals is quite legal: they operate (in both senses) within the law. The law, therefore, needs changing so that animal experiments can be phased out over (say) a five year period. During this time existing alternatives could be refined and intensive research carried out into further alternative research techniques. Then there would be no "need" for wretched "laboratory animals", and I suspect that even the scientists would be glad.

Ruarc Gahan
Irish Anti-Vivisection Society
Business Health, March 2000

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