Understand the truth about animal experimentation


Yale has just announced an experiment by its scientists on a nonhuman animal that has significant medical implications for human beings. Cellular function was restored as much as an hour after the death of the animal. This may portend extended opportunities for surgery and organ transplants.

Full disclosure: I am a scholar at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and, in disagreement with some of my colleagues, I am opposed to animal experimentation. But I also know that my colleagues, as well the animal experimenters and staff, are well- meaning, competent, reflective and certainly caring and concerned individuals.

My goal in writing is to help clarify what is going on in animal experimentation so that the citizenry, who wittingly or unwittingly enable it, for example, with their tax dollars and votes in elections, will have a better basis for making up their minds about whether they really want to support it. And my method is simple: to get beyond the technical and euphemistic, or vague or misleading language that is often used to discuss it, and use plain language instead.

So in the present case the Yale press release informs us that organ function was restored in pigs “after death.” But how did the pigs die? All we are told is that “cardiac arrest was induced.” I take this to mean, therefore , that the pigs were killed.

Pigs are well known to be intelligent and even lovable animals. Some people have them as pets. Personally I consider this to be irrelevant to my not wanting them to be treated as “lab animals,” which means confined for their whole lives, experimented on , and killed … no more than I would require intelligence and lovableness to be required of a human being to spare them from such treatment. But I mention these traits to put the situation in stark relief for all you pet owners out there, who would never condone this kind of treatment for your nonhuman family members.

However, the medical researchers will argue, it might someday be a human family member of yours (or youor me) who will benefit from their research on the pigs. True enough (although I am well aware that some people are more informed than I argue that nonanimal research could do at least as much good, and promoting healthy lifestyles many times as much good). They would also argue that many people who object to animal experimentation don’t seem to mind eating animals, even pigs; yet the animals raised and killed for food are treated with far less consideration than the animals in reputable research labs. Also true.

My response is, first, that I am a vegan for this very reason, and encourage everybody to be; and, second, that all of us oppose comparable experiments on human beingsincluding raising orphans for precisely this purpose, even though that would be even more likely to benefit a human family member of ours.

But, the animal experimenter might reply, do I or would I refuse life-saving or other medical treatment that had resulted from animal experimentation, or refuse such treatment for a family member? No, I would not. But neither would I refuse treatments that resulted from comparable experiments on humans done before modern standards of human research had become the norm. This would in no way, however, keep me from strenuously opposing any such experiments to be performed today.

I don’t believe there is a right or wrong answer about the ethics of animal research in general … only more and less informed, reflective and compassionate preferences. I cannot be sure where I fall on that spectrum, since of course compassion applies to the humans in need of medical attention as well as the nonhumans being experimented on. But, after decades of study and dialogue, I know where I stand: Stop the research now.

Joel Marks is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of New Haven and scholar at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University.




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Jorge Oliveira

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