‘On Behalf of Medical Science’

I am in perpetual awe of man’s arrogance. The question is not whether animals are useful to medical research. That assertion is highly debatable and is debated in many quarters. But it is rather whether we are to assume that animals may be exploited in this manner as a “given,” with no doubt or second thoughts about the truth of this axiom.

There are moral and ethical issues here that go quite a way beyond whether this institution or that lab will or will not get their funding. Regardless of animals’ potential usefulness, and regardless of custom, which had made animal experimentation a globally widespread, lucrative, and growing business for about one century, there is a also a growing uneasiness (brought by recent neurological studies on non-human species, and by deepening awareness of the connectedness of all things) concerning the blatant assumptions of species-specific imperialism: Man is the master, all other creatures are treated as slaves and renewable resources.

Granted, higher mammals have no speech. But they “talk” in their own ways; they communicate; there is ample scientific evidence that finally joined plain common sense in acknowledging animal thought, feelings, and emotions. They are neurologically our cousins. Can we, as moral agents, truly feel justified in vivisecting, incarcerating, torturing, rendering diseased and insane, these sentient creatures so like ourselves, in the name of the last bastion of unabashed prejudice: “speciesism”?

Funny that we should be so worked up over an unborn human, and at the same time be so unconcerned over adults with a life and a history, an individuality and a will to live and live well, as long as they are not our “kind.”

RACHEL ROSENTHAL

Los Angeles