Every year, millions of nonhuman animals are subjected to unimaginable pain, stifling confinement and death in laboratories all over the world. The practice is by no means uncommon; on the contrary, many companies, hospitals, universities and various other institutions have their own testing or research facilities where experiments are carried out. Also, the use of animals is the norm in the academic field: in biology, pharmacy, veterinary medicine or psychology classes, where dissections, vivisections and other exploitative practices involving animals are carried out.
The argument goes that humans and other animals are similar enough for experiments to be useful, yet different enough to justify the use of the latter and not the former as non-consenting test subjects. But can it really be justified to use beings who have the capacity to feel pain and pleasure as means to others’ ends?
Animals are forced to swallow toxic substances, have tumours deliberately grown in their bodies, have their skin and eyes burned with irritant chemicals, have electrodes implanted into their skulls, are deprived of sleep and food, endure radiation tests, suffer electric shocks… For biomedical research, in military investigations, drug or cosmetic testing, in education or in psychological experimentation, animals are used as laboratory tools. They are bred or captured for this purpose and disposed of when the experiment is over – unless they are ‘recycled’ for another experiment. Knowing, as we do, that animals have the capacity to feel pain, it hardly seems reasonable to deny the harm experimentation on these beings causes them.
Like other practices involving the use of nonhuman animals, vivisection reflects a view that they are things, resources, which can be used for human ends, simply because they are not human. It is sometimes argued that while some of the uses of animals that currently take place in laboratories (such as cosmetics or weapon testing) are unjustifiable and should be banned, others should be defended, since they are carried out in the name of science and human health. Let us see what is wrong with this argument.
Sentient beings or laboratory tools?
During the Nazi regime, thousands of human beings died as a result of horrendous experiments. The physicians who carried out such procedures defended them on the grounds that the results obtained contributed to medical and scientific progress. However, any benefits obtained cannot possibly justify torturing and killing others, because the human beings used in these experiments had the capacity to experience pain and joy and suffered tremendously.
The use of animals for this same reason is often defended by making the claim that “they” are “animals”, and “we” are “humans”, without further argument, ignoring the fact that humans are animals, too. It’s interesting to remember that this very same argument was used by the Nazi doctors in their attempts to justify their experiments. The humans who were experimented on were used for that purpose allegedly because they didn’t belong to a certain racial group (that is, the ‘Aryan’). This fact is useful to show that membership of a group is a factor that cannot be used as a reason to discriminate against others, whether the group be ethnicity, gender or species. The only thing that should determine whether to give consideration and respect to an animal, whether human or nonhuman, is if that being can suffer pain or experience joy; if he or she can be harmed by our actions. Any other characteristic, such as a certain degree of “intelligence”, the ability to speak, and so on, has no relevance at all.
In fact, many of the people used in experiments during the Nazi regime were chosen because they appeared to have lesser intellectual capacities than others, that is, for being “mentally disabled”. Also, if we accepted these capacities as a reason to discriminate against someone, babies would fall into this category. Since this argument is rightly rejected today, there is no basis at all for using these very same reasons to justify animal experimentation. None of us, no creature who can feel, can with justification be viewed as only a tool, and subjected to torture and death. Experimentation upon animals is as unjust and indefensible as experimentation upon non-consenting humans.
Good science
Supporters of animal experimentation sometimes claim that those who demand that animals not be used as laboratory tools are “anti-science”. That’s as absurd as saying that those who opposed Nazi experiments with humans were against the development of science. The issue is not whether we are opposed to research, but whether we are right to discriminate arbitrarily against others and harm them for our own benefit, simply because they are not members of our race or species, or because, despite being as capable of suffering as we are, they are supposedly less “intelligent” than us–where intelligence is defined in human-centric terms. As we have already pointed out, there is no justification for giving less importance to the interests of someone who can feel just as much as we do.
This is the reason why the use of nonhuman animals as laboratory tools is unacceptable, just as the use of human beings was during the Second World War. So it should be immediately replaced by test methods which do not use animals. Examples of these are:
- Cell and tissue culture, which allow the scientist to evaluate human reactions to certain substances.
- QSAR (Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships) models and other computer techniques, which use programmes showing dynamic representations of biological processes.
- Physico-chemical techniques, which use non-biological systems to analyse data, such as gas chromatography or mass spectrometry.
- Clinical research – the observation and tracking of the development of different diseases in the patients themselves who give their informed consent.
- Epidemiology – the statistical study of the processes of different diseases.
- Finally, in the field of education, many different methods exist to replace the use of animals in dissection and other procedures – computer modelling, inanimate dummies and models, audio-visual techniques, cadavers of people who have asked for their bodies to be used after death for medical research.
Thus, resources which are currently dedicated to using animals as objects of experimentation must be diverted to the development and use of methods which do not inflict suffering and death on beings possessing consciousness and the capacity for pain and pleasure.