Maybe Professor Jonathan Wolff read our blog Horses for Courses, in which we were critical of his oversimplification of the numbers of animals used in different areas of research. His article in today’s Education Guardian Killing softly is much fairer.
As an academic philosopher who visited animal labs while a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics working party (see their in-depth report The Ethics of Research Involving Animals), he is comfortable with conditions for lab animals:
“I was taken to university and pharmaceutical labs, as well as a contract research facility. All the animals I saw were kept in far better conditions than those in the smelly pet shop where I had recently purchased a hamster. It was a world away from the battery chicken farm I worked on as a teenager. I was surprised by how orderly everything looked. I saw much less pain and suffering than I was expecting.”
He continues:
"…while pain and suffering are almost entirely avoided, the death of the animal seems to be of no consequence, at least as far as the current regulations are concerned. Animal pain is taboo; animal death is all in a day’s work….One reason for feeling disquiet might be based on a belief that every animal is valuable in itself, and so taking its life is morally problematic. Many people will reply that an animal life does not matter in itself; all that matters is what happens to the animal during its life."
Public opinion research has shown that people have sometimes contradictory but often quite sophisticated attitudes. In fact, what they tend to do is weigh potential animal suffering against potential medical benefits. The numbers – or should one say deaths – of animals in research don’t enter the equation. How could they in our meat-eating society? We eat 300 times more animals than we use in research. Maybe we just don’t want to think about the numbers.
Also in today’s Education Guardian, but not online, a profile of RDS’s chair Professor Nancy Rothwell. Maybe before they put it online they can correct two important errors:
"a former chair of the Research Defence Society”
“it’s our job to say this is how many animals we use, this is what happens to them, this is what happens to the results, but to say therefore you must accept it."
The first is obvious (she was still our chair last time I looked), the second less so: I assume one little word is missing: it should read
"it’s our job to say this is how many animals we use, this is what happens to them, this is what happens to the results, but not to say therefore you must accept it."
<Wrap up...>
