Those poor little animals :-(

Recent thoughts that ended up being a one-page paper for my class ...

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Life forms, particularly those of the animal kingdom, come into existence without an understanding of the world around them. However, although an organism needs to learn about the world in which it lives in order to survive, it does not need to learn how to sense, to feel, and to suffer. Such experience is inherently granted to those with a nervous system capable of such biopsychological computations.

More than any other, the human species has an intellect capable of learning about world in which it lives. With this intellect and their senses, humans use scientific methods to understand and manipulate this world. Thus, it is through the research process that humans learn how to take control of their experiences in effort to live a better life. In biomedical research, humans take control of treatment and prevention of a major source of their suffering: disease.

Thus, because of their intellect, humans have been granted the capacity to investigate how to relieve suffering. A problem arises, however, in the means by which humans carry out these biomedical investigations. In order to learn how to cure a disease, experiments must be performed on individuals with the disease, and these experiments may, and often do, cause suffering in themselves.  Thus, “more suffering” becomes the means to the end of “less suffering”.  Humans have found this means to an end unacceptable, and, not wanting to suffer more, have replaced their role in biomedical questions with those who can provide somewhat equivalent answers – with animals.

Although humans have resolved their problem of suffering, they have created a new problem: the suffering of animals. In the process of biomedical research, animals of diverse species are subject to manipulation, pain, neglect, and death: all experience humans want to avoid. It is at the cost of animal suffering that humans gain life without (or with less) suffering. Of course, efforts could be made to minimize cruel and unnecessary harm to animals, a maxim currently emphasized in biomedical research. Nonetheless, the human must ask herself, would I be willing to undergo the same experience as my research animals? If not, then how am I justified in carrying out my experiments on them?

One could argue that animals, due to their simpler nervous system, do not have the as great of a capacity for suffering as do humans. In the sense that animals may not have hopes, dreams, and future goals, this may be a valid argument. There is no evidence that animals have such capacities. Thus, to use animals in research would not rob them of such experiences, whereas to use humans would rob them of such experiences. However, there is behavioral evidence that animals show signs of and avoid pain, and neuroscientific evidence that animals have very similar brain capacities to experience pain, stress, fear, and anger as do humans.¹ Therefore, animals do suffer to an comparable extent when subject to biomedical research as would humans.

Despite the notion that animals suffer in the research process, those who support the use of animals often maintain the mentality that “it’s better them than us”. Humans are, after all, the greatest of all species; they have higher intelligence and more control of their environment than any other species. From this perspective, these advocates presume that humans have a greater inherent value than animals. However, arguing for such a position makes one, in the words of Richard Ryder, a ‘speciesist’. The speciesist argues humans are greater than animals in the same way that the racists argues black people are greater than white people and in the same way that the sexist argues women are greater than men. In the context of the use of animals in biomedical research, speciesism is a problem because both humans and animals share the capacity to suffer, and to choose to make animals suffer instead of humans does not reduce the total suffering caused by the research process.

If the goal of biomedical research is to reduce suffering, humans fail to achieve this goal when they use animals in their investigation. By subjecting animals to experimental manipulations, humans cause an alternative source of the suffering they are trying to eliminate. For this reason, animals should not be used in biomedical research.

1. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation, 2nd edition, New York: Avon Books, 1990, pp. 10-12, 14-15.  

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... the funny thing is, I don't actually buy my own argument. If you do, feel free to puff it up and elaborate. If you don't, feel free to tear it to shreds. It's a pretty interesting debate.

Ciao.