I originally wrote this to help me organize my thoughts for an interview that I did for a documentary on vivisection at McGill. The piece received a lot positive feedback, so here it is with some modifications based on that feedback.
Most people, not just vegans, agree with the idea that it is wrong to cause unnecessary suffering to other animals.
It is from this position that ethical vegans start. Essentially, animals are sentient. They are self-aware and have their own wants and desires in life. To use them when we do not need to do so for our own survival is wrong. It is not giving the proper weight to the interests of those animals (at the very least, they have the desire to be free from suffering) when compared to our trivial desires (I like the taste, the look, it is tradition, etc).
These days, it is quite easy to make the argument that eating a diet free of animal products can be healthy, varied and quite satesfying. Equally, it is not hard to avoid zoos and circuses or to avoid buying clothing and cosmetics that were once a someone, or that were tested on someone against their will.
But vivsection requires a bit of a different argument. Many people believe that as distastful as vivisection is, it is essential for the advancement of human health and wellbeing.
I don't think that that is really the case, and I would argue that many researchers do not think that the general public would buy that argument either if they knew the full details of what went on behind the closed doors of the laboratories.
Before we can go into the specifics, we need to break down the different types of vivisection. At McGill, there are 3 main types of animal use (aside from what goes on in the food services, and relatedly what goes on at MacDonald Campus). These can broadly be described as:
1 / Studies of a fundamental nature in science relating to essential structure or function. (biology, psychology, biochemistry, pharmacology, etc)
2 / Studies for medical purposes, including veterinary medicine, that relates to human or animal disease or disorders.
3 / Education and training of individuals in either veterinary medicine or human medicine.
For simplicity, we will address them in reverse order. According to Scientific American, most European countries do not have any high school dissection, and countries such as Britain have not allowed the use of animals to teach surgery skills to medical or veterinary students for over one hundred years. Yet, we still consider British doctors and vets to be well trained and good at their trade.
Medical research is perhaps the most contentious of the issues because after all, the use of animals in this type of reserach has lead to serious breakthroughs in the past, such as with diabetes. But there is a serious flaw in that justification: almost all reserach on curing disease has involved nonhuman animals. It would be nearly impossible for something to have been discovered without using other animals because their use in this manner is so ubiquitous. But just because in the past few hundred years we have not moved significantly to non-animal models does not mean that we could not or should not do so. We also know that nonhuman animal models make for bad science. We justify our use of these individuals because they are different from us, yet at the same time, for us to be able to extrapolate the results of the research to humans, they need to be similar to us.
Medical history is rife with incidents where human lives were lost because of our reliance on nonhuman animal models. The polio vaccine comes to mind, where it was not until research was moved to invitro models with human tissue that we really began to understand how polio works and were able to come up with a vaccine. Similarly, early research into using veins for things like bypass surgery were discounted as viable options because research using dogs showed that it would not likely work. When tests were done with animal models on the correlation of smoking and cancer, animal tests were inconclusive, even though statistically the correlation was there in humans. With that inconclusive research in hand, the tobbaco industry was able to delay warnings about smoking for many years. Again, almost the exact same situation happened with asbestos. Those are just a few examples, but you get the idea. If you keep digging, you will find many more.
There is also a moral dilema with research and certain diseases where we know how to prevent the disease, but for political reasons, medical research is easier even if more costly and less efficient. We see this with diabetes, heart disease and cancer, where if we modified our lifestyles, we could seriously reduce the incidents of what are essentially lifestyle releated diseases. We also see it with diseases like HIV, where billions of dollars have been spent on research instead of targeting the spread of the disease through safe sex education and needle exchanges -- both of which are politically diffitult areas.
Lastly, there have been many drugs that have passed nonhuman animal tests and ended up in human populations with disasterous results. Drugs like thalidomide, and Avandia are still recognized for the problems they caused, but there are many more that fall into this category and many more that are silently removed from the market after they fail the initial human trials.
Is it bad science? I am not a scientist, but I would seriously hesitate to call this "good" science.
So that leaves us with researching "fundamental scientific questions". Often these are benign, and these are the experiments that we hear about on science shows and read about in the newspaper. Studies that were undertaken in the wild, or in which captured wild animals were held for only a very sort duration before being released unharmed. But it is the other experiments that we do not hear much about that really worry researchers.
Some of the classic ones include the "maternal deprivation" experiments of Dr. Harlow at the University of Wisconsin, where infant monkeys were separated from their mothers and reared in total isolation, or with "surrogate" mothers made of wire and cloth, some of whome hurt the infants whenever they sought affection from them.
Or the "learned helplessness" experiments conducted by Dr. Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania, who shocked and burned dogs with such intensity and duration that they just gave up trying to escape the pain.
If any of this research was conducted on human subjects, willing or not, we would think of the researchers as monsters.
What allows them to continue to engage in this is not just that much of the research is kept secret (until published in scientifict journals that most non-scientists do not read), but rather our view of animal use in society.
We can look at these examples of vivisection and be disgusted with them, but the reality is that vivisection makes up a tiny fraction of the animal use in our world. Far more animals are used every day for "food" than anything else. Vivisection however makes an easy target for animal avocates because it generally does not ask that people change. It asks only that they dislike something that they are likely not invovled in. We see the same behaviour with regards to anti-seal hunting and circuses.
That is why personally, as much as I dislike the idea of vivisection, hunting and circuses, it is not where I generally focus my efforts. Instead, I am of the strong opinion that we all have a moral obligation to be vegan. Animals should not be property, and that if we give them proper moral consideration, then we can not continue to justify using them the way that we currently do -- be it for food and clothing, or for vivisection.
