Animal (Research) Rights

_"Science and Self-Doubt" by Frederick K. Goodwin and Adrian R. Morrison, in Reason (Oct. 2000), 3415 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Ste. 400, Los Angeles, Calif. 90034–6064._

The animal rights movement has been con-extremists even resorting to terrorism. In April demning scientists’ use of animals in biomed-1999, for instance, the Animal Liberation ical research for two decades now, with some Front caused more than $1.5 million in damage to a University of Minnesota laboratory. The animal rights campaign has had powerful effects, write Goodwin, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, and Morrison, a professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Pennsylvania: "Nothing impairs creativity like fear."

The animal rights movement considers animals "moral agents on a par with people," Goodwin and Morrison note. Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation (1975) and now a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, maintains that all creatures able to feel pain are morally equal to human beings. Ingrid Newkirk, national director of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, once infamously declared that "six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses."

The animal rights philosophy is "profoundly confused," contend Goodwin and Morrison. "Rights stem from the uniquely human capacity to choose values and principles, then act on choices and judgment." Extending the concept of rights to animals "dangerously subverts" the concept itself.

The activists also are guilty of opportunism in their choice of targets, the authors contend. More than 99 percent of the animals used by people are used for food, clothing, sport, and other everyday purposes, yet the activists aim their protests chiefly at scientific research. Why? Scientists have less political clout than farmers and hunters.

"Less than a quarter of the studies in biomedicine involve animals (and more than 90 percent of those are rats and mice), but . . . such animal studies are indispensable," the authors assert. Dr. Thomas E. Starzl, a pio-neer in kidney transplants, once noted that most of the subjects died in his first series of experimental transplants, but by the fourth series, all survived. Fortunately, the earlier subjects were dogs; only in the fourth series did he use human babies.

Even deliberately inflicting pain on animals is sometimes justified, the authors believe. This is done in an estimated seven percent of research, and it "has enabled us to develop effective painkillers."

Attempting to meet animal rights activists halfway, Goodwin and Morrison say, is "a losing game." Now a push is on to require justification of animal research by specifying the particular outcomes sought. But many scientific and medical discoveries—such as the value of lithium in treating bipolar disorder—came about by accident rather than design.

Scientists, they conclude, should recognize that they are in "a struggle for minds" and be clear about what justifies animal research: "Human beings are special."