The 1998 report issued by the Department of Agriculture listed 140,471 dogs, 42,271 cats, 51,641 primates, 431,457 guinea pigs, 331,945 hamsters, 459,254 rabbits, and 178, 249 “wild animals”: a total of 1,635,288 used in experimentation.
– Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins 2009).
Vivi-what?
The term vivisection was unfamiliar to me until I started to look into animal rights issues. These days, when I choose to avoid the term vivisection and use ‘animal experiments’ instead, I sense that people aren’t particularly aware of the difference between the two terms. There is simply a lack of information surrounding the issue. Many seem to think that animal tests are used sparingly, only in life-saving circumstances such as research for HIV/AIDS, and that in these situations, animals are treated with utmost care for their “contribution to science.”
The fact that we are using animals — sentient beings — in the first place poses an ethical question. They are basically treated as mere objects and tools — “models,” as industry journal Lab Animal refers to them. What makes it worse is that these experiments, even under the highly-esteemed medical research category, are practically useless. According to Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, “nine out of ten experimental drugs fail in clinical studies because we cannot accurately predict how they will behave in people based on laboratory and animal studies.” [1]
Examples of Vivisection
Vivisection consists of military tests, psychological research, product testing, and medical research. The following examples of animal testing are selectively derived from book Animal Liberation by Peter Singer.
One experiment used a flight simulator called Primate Equilibrium Platform to test how exposures to radiation and chemical warfare agents affect the ability of monkeys to fly an aircraft. To train monkeys, electrical shocks had to be administered up to one hundred times a day or a total of thousands of electric shocks throughout the experiment. Once monkeys had learned to operate the aircraft, they were then exposed to lethal or sublethal doses of radiation or chemical warfare agents. This was where the real experiment began. The end result was that the monkeys showed symptoms of loss of coordination, weakness, and intention tremor.
Another experiment consisted of beagle dogs being fed varied doses of explosive TNT throughout a period of 6 months. This was conducted under the direction of the U.S. Army Medical Bioengineering Research and Development Laboratory at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland. The result was that the dogs experienced dehydration, emaciation, anemia, jaundice, low body temperature, discolored urine and feces, diarrhea, loss of appetite, weight loss, enlarged livers, spleens, and kidneys. As if this wasn’t or cruel enough, the test conclusion was that “additional studies of TNT in beagle dogs may be warranted.”
In the field of psychological research, many experiments used animals as subjects in controlled experiments, rather than studying available data in depth through actual human behavior. One such experiment was conducted by Professor Harry F. Harlow. In his experiment to determine the lifelong effects of maternal deprivation, depression was induced by allowing baby monkeys to attach to abusive surrogate mothers. They reared female monkeys in complete isolation, after which they were impregnated with a technique accurately called “rape rack.” The test result was depressed baby monkeys reaching out for help from surrogate mothers who treated them even worse.
In product testing, a common test for cosmetics, bathroom, and household products is called LD50 or “lethal dose 50 percent”. The point of the test is to find out what amount of the substance will kill 50 percent of the test subjects when force-fed. The very intention of this test is to kill half of the animals and to conduct the testing again and again until the 50% kill-ratio is achieved.
The Draize eye irritancy test is another common product testing methodology. As the name suggests, products are tested in animals’ eyes. The animals are restrained so they are unable to move, scratch, or rub their eyes — so the “integrity” of the test can be retained. It is not uncommon for eye swelling, ulceration, infection, bleeding, and even total loss of vision to occur. It is important to emphasize that the testing bears no relevance to the actual situations wherein the products are to be used. A Draize eye test can be used to test deodorant, for example.
Many experiments under medical research are conducted not for any breakthrough findings, but merely to satisfy an intellectual curiosity, with these experiments’ outcomes already known. As an example, Yale University School of Medicine students conducted an experiment on kittens by placing them in a “radiant-heating” chamber, which resulted in convulsions. Their report said: “The findings in artificially induced fever in kittens conform to the clinical and EEG findings in human beings and previous clinical findings in kittens” (italics mine).
Cruel, Faulty Science
Saying no to vivisection is not being anti-science. On the contrary, we cannot rely on the accuracy of animal tests in many occasions. As a data point, in a toxicity test involving 56 substances, 45% of findings from animal tests cannot be replicated in humans. Even with medicine we use today, the effects differ significantly among animals and humans. Acetaminophen, for instance, is “poisonous to cats but is a therapeutic in humans; penicillin is toxic in guinea pigs but has been an invaluable tool in human medicine; morphine causes hyper-excitement in cats but has a calming effect in human patients; and oral contraceptives prolong blood-clotting times in dogs but increase a human’s risk of developing blood clots.” [2]
Because vivisection is used as the standard for medical testing today, we have wasted a lot of money, time, animal lives and human lives. Take, for instance, the linking of smoking to lung cancer. When the correlation was reported based on an epidemiological study in 1954, it was dismissed because the result could not be replicated in animal experiments. It took 30 more years for the initial finding to be accepted — that is 30 years’ worth of animal and human lives that could have been saved. [3]
Another misleading experiment was the study on a drug called Mitoxantrone. When tested on beagle dogs, the drug did not show links to cardiac failure, and so it was approved for human testing. Later on, “data from 3,360 patients receiving mitoxantrone included 88 reports of cardiac side effects with 29 cases of heart failure.” [4]
Because much variance can be derived from experimentation among different species, vivisection is also an easy way for research practitioners to manipulate experiments for their own interests. All researchers have to do is switch species until their desired outcome is derived. If their experiment on rats did not produce the desired result, they will repeat the experiment in rabbits, and then in cats, and then in dogs, and then in monkeys, and so on, until they find the results that will get them their research grants and funding. By this time, countless animals would have suffered and died with no guarantee of any significant finding.
There are many other examples of vivisection as bad science, and the bottom line simply is that because of our attachment to using animals for experimentation, we are not only being cruel to beings who are sentient enough to feel pain, but we are also impeding progress in the medical field.
Speciesism: Animals as Property
The reason vivisection still exists today is not because it is necessarily an effective means of research, but largely because of speciesism. Speciesism is the discrimination towards species other than our own. Speciesism allows us to justify the harm we do to animals by clinging on to the false belief that our interests and trivial concerns precede the comfort and preferences of others. Even as non-practitioners of medicine, many of our schools and universities require dissection of frogs, cats, and other animals in basic biology classes. We can all agree that such experiments are not necessary in the advancement of knowledge as a whole, for we are merely studying what is already known. The reason we continue to do this is because as speciesists, we see nothing inherently wrong with this practice. This further desensitizes us as our own educational institutions force the idea that animals are mere objects, tools, or properties.
To end vivisection and other forms of animal exploitation, we have to reject the property status of animals, an animal rights theory introduced by Gary L. Francione. It is not enough that animals are “treated better,” for properties remain a sign of ownership, where the owner has the right and privilege to do whatever he or she pleases with the property. It is always a relationship of power and dominion over that which is owned.
Even if vivisection can lead to valuable medical findings, it still cannot be morally justifiable in the same way that experimenting on brain-dead human beings or newly-born babies cannot be morally justifiable. In the subject of morality, the question is not skill or intelligence or likeness to humans. The only qualifying criterion is sentience or capacity to feel. We cannot own anyone who has the capacity to feel, and we certainly cannot experiment on them without their consent.
What Does This Have To Do With Me?
You are unconsciously contributing to animal cruelty — and I say this with certainty if you wash your hair with shampoo, shower with soap, and brush your teeth with toothpaste. It is horrific to think that in the name of a new variant of shampoo, animals have to suffer and die (and they most certainly die, as animals are normally “discarded” after the experiment has concluded.)
If you think you’re being a good Samaritan by donating to a cancer research fund, again, this has everything to do with you. Find out if the charity you are donating to is still using vivisection or has advanced to in-vitro, tissue cultures, cell cultures, computer simulations, and other non-invasive procedures. Not only are these methods less cruel, they are also more relevant to human health and medicine.
The power in being a consumer is that we vote with the currency most understood by businesses and corporations — profit. There are many injustices in the world, but the injustice of animal cruelty is a very direct one that we can stop. It is one that we either choose to sustain or choose to boycott. It was said in the documentary Earthlings that “it takes nothing away from a human to be kind to an animal”. But when I really think about my own choices to boycott animal cruelty, my motivation is not so much of kindness but one of justice. One does not have to be an “animal lover” to oppose suffering. One does not have to be a radical activist to create positive change. It could start with the shampoo you use today, that is how ridiculously simple it is. The truth about vivisection is that it cannot be justified, nobody deserves it, and nobody benefits from it. The truth about cats and dogs — and monkeys and rabbits and rats and guinea pigs and all other animals — is that they are sentient, just like you and I.
Resources:
[1] Food and Drug Administration (2006, Jan. 12). FDA Issues Advice to Make Earliest Stages of Clinical Dug Development More Efficient. Press Release. Retrieved March 2008, from http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/news/2006/NEW01296.html.
[2] and [3] Problems with Animal Research.
http://www.aavs.org/site/c.bkLTKfOSLhK6E/b.6456997/k.3D74/Problems_with_Animal_Research.htm
[4] Beagle Dogs Mislead Cancer Research
http://www.iaapea.com/101_page.php?id=47
Search for cruelty-free companies:
http://www.peta.org/living/beauty-and-personal-care/companies/default.aspx
If animals were capable of thought they'd see us humans as evil incarnate.
Suggested further reading- Gary L. Francione's essays: http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/vivisection-p… http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/vivisection-p… http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/on-vivisectio…
A happy ending for a few lab animals- get to know them. Theirs is a happy ending but few would be so lucky: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2034439/L…
As for vivisection for medical research, although some discoveries are derived from animal testing, we cannot really say that this is attributed to animal testing alone since other options were not sought out at that time. If other methods were used, perhaps the same conclusions could have been derived as well. The argument always seems to be one of "necessity". But this assumes that there is absolutely no other way to address health problems like cancer, HIV etc. In reality, cancer can be addressed by spending money on prevention campaigns, HIV with safe sex education etc.
My use of brain-dead humans is a faulty one as they are not sentient. Or are they? Anyway I would replace it with the example of a retarded human being or a month-old baby. The bottomline being, as long as one is capable of feeling pain, then they at least have the right not to be harmed- that is the animal rights position.
Judging from the lack of commentary on the subject of product testing, I assume that you are agreeing with me that subjecting animals to pain and suffering for shampoo/soap/etc is trivial and unnecessary. Much of vivisection actually falls under this category. THIS cruelty we can at least reduce. And these are labeled. Products not tested on animals are labeled as "vegan" (not tested on animals and contains no animal products and byproducts), and "not tested on animals". "We do not test on animals" only means that the company did not test on animals, but they may have outsourced it. "Our finished products are not tested on animals" means precisely that- only the finished product is not tested, but their ingredients from their sources may have been tested on animals.
In a real-life dangerous situation (e.g. fire), I would probably still choose a human over an animal. But these are extreme cases that are (hopefully) not going to happen to us in our everyday lives. Much of the animal experiments are actually done for trivial purposes, for product testing of shampoos, soaps, cosmetic products, household products. What I am advocating is that at the very least, we as consumers boycott products tested on animals as our vote against animal cruelty. Even if your position is that vivisection for medical research is ok, I at least advocate that for these other trivial uses, please look into other options.
I maintain that the reason why vivisection exists today is because of speciesism and not effectiveness. It would be more effective to test on human prisoners, I suppose, but it's not being done because it's inhumane- it will violate human rights. The same way, it would be more effective to kidnap pre-selected human beings based on their genetic disposition, but we don't do that as well, because it's wrong. Speciesism is the denial that exerting our power over another species and using them for our purposes is wrong. It is denying the right of animals to be free from harm. As long as we don't recognize that it is wrong to inflict harm on animals and that their interest not to be harmed is equal to our right not to be harmed, our prevailing attitude would then be: it's ok to use them because it's effective/convenient.
I meant to equate vivisection with animal testing. Although vivisection originally meant cutting up live animals, it is now widely accepted to use the term to refer to experimentation on live animals. The original essay I submitted implies that it is the same but the editing ommitted that: "The term vivisection was unfamiliar to me until I started to look into animal rights issues. These days, when I choose to use the term animal experiments in place of vivisection, I sense that people don’t instinctively sense that there is- or that there should be- any stigma around it."
Am I the only one bothered by the the use of "vivisection"?
I think even though (or rather, especially because) people aren't familiar with the difference between vivisection and animal experimentation, you should have started off with defining the difference, and using the correct term for your article: Animal Experimentation.
Vivisection, unless I am wrong, is from the latin for "live cutting", meaning the conducting of surgery on animals that are still alive. It is a subset of animal experimentation, thus not the proper term for most of your article.
I am reminded of the space program in the 50s, where both the United States and Russia were sending monkeys and dogs into orbit prior to sending manned missions.
Cruel in retrospect, but the fact is had it not been for this, NASA wouldn't have been able to properly test the life support systems they'd eventually use for the Apollo missions, and eventually the space shuttle. While I am against unnecessary animal cruelty, I do understand that it has its place in research, at least until somebody can develop a fully functional human analog.
"We can all agree that such experiments are not necessary in the advancement of knowledge as a whole, for we are merely studying what is already known." What do you think people do in schools? Students "merely" study "what is already known." This lays the foundation for further discoveries and trains the next generation of educated individuals.
This is all not to say that there are no ethical problems with animal experimentation. Some scientists and corporations undeniably cause egregious animal suffering for no palpable benefit to society, such as in the field of cosmetics. But to be dismissive of all animal experimentation outright and use tenuous quotes mined from sources surely does not support your cause.
(Part 5 of 5)
"The reason vivisection still exists today is not because it is necessarily an effective means of research, but largely because of speciesism." Well, no. The reason vivisection still exists today is because it produces good results and because human well-being is arguably more worthy of concern due to our range of experience. To what degree is debatable. This is why we don't cut open or intentionally induce cancers in humans.
If you concede to the difference in our moral responsibility towards flies and towards orangutans, then you will have to concede to the difference in our moral responsibility towards humans and towards even highly intelligent and self-aware creatures like dolphins. Though the former example presents an easily solvable moral question and the latter is a lot more nuanced, the basic argument is laid clear: moral status is dictated by neurological structure and the capabilities of conscious creatures for well-being and suffering.
From this, we can start to have an ethical framework that allows for differentiating species by moral status but not being "speciesist." Does this mean we are free to abuse chimps for our own pleasure? No, what we know of their neural structures tells us that their range of experience is very close to ours and they can experience suffering to a significant degree. But to blindly disregard the differences between species (no matter how small or how great) is itself prejudicial, arbitrary, and incognizant of what we know from science. You yourself argue for this distinction in moral status, "The only qualifying criterion is sentience or capacity to feel." And yet you contradict yourself when you decry "experimenting on brain-dead human beings", which are not sentient and have no capacity to feel. I personally have no qualms with this and this could possibly produce superior results to the animal model experimentation you criticize. Your example on newly-born babies is contentious as these babies will grow up to experience and understand their trauma, if not experience the trauma immediately. This is another discussion, but it only serves to illustrate that neurology inevitably informs, if not decides, morality.
(Part 4 of 5)
"Because much variance can be derived from experimentation among different species, vivisection is also an easy way for research practitioners to manipulate experiments for their own interests. All researchers have to do is switch species until their desired outcome is derived. If their experiment on rats did not produce the desired result, they will repeat the experiment in rabbits, and then in cats, and then in dogs, and then in monkeys, and so on, until they find the results that will get them their research grants and funding. By this time, countless animals would have suffered and died with no guarantee of any significant finding." This paragraph is riddled with such innuendo that it is simply offensive. To callously send out a blanket accusation against scientists of no particular identity, without any evidence I might add, of dishonesty and results tampering is just unfair. What's worse is that the accusation doesn't even reflect an understanding of how different animal models are used for different kinds of experiments. Since animal models are not perfect simulacra of humans, we can't just use one species to study response to testing.
(Part 3 of 5)
"The very intention of this test is to kill half of the animals and to conduct the testing again and again until the 50% kill-ratio is achieved." This is simply not true. The LD50 measure is not used for the "intention" of killing 50% of test subjects. You got it backwards and, in doing so, foisted malice upon scientists. LD50 is simply the chemical concentration observed where 50% of the samples were killed. It's not like they turn up the dial for kicks until they get half of all animals killed.
In the same breath, you state that you are not being anti-science and yet you dismiss the knowledge derived from the very trial-and-error principle of scientific experimentation. It's one thing to find the method morally repugnant, it's another thing to so casually propound that a scientifically sound method is wrong. "As a data point, in a toxicity test involving 56 substances, 45% of findings from animal tests cannot be replicated in humans." You've dismissed 55% right off bat. And, again, you imply that that 45% produced no useful knowledge. The differential response of animals to the chemicals is itself telltale of the biochemical mechanisms involved. It's not all or nothing.
Not to dismiss the suffering that is intrinsic in drug testing but even your own example showed a less than 1% failure rate: "data from 3,360 patients receiving mitoxantrone included 88 reports of cardiac side effects with 29 cases of heart failure."
(Part 2 of 5)
The statement, "What makes it worse is that these experiments, even under the highly-esteemed medical research category, are practically useless." is not nearly supported by the presented "evidence" of “nine out of ten experimental drugs fail in clinical studies because we cannot accurately predict how they will behave in people based on laboratory and animal studies.”
The fact that animal models do not perfectly mirror human response to drugs does not make animal experimentation useless. Not in the least. What you are implying is that there is absolutely no usable knowledge to be derived from the response of animal models from experimental drugs. Proposing that animal experiments are useless because they do not produce approved drugs more than 10% of the time betrays the thoughts of someone unfamiliar with science. A null result in an experiment is still a result, one that informs further experiments.
The very experiments you used show how human harm was avoided and useful data was obtained on the response of organ systems systems such as those of monkeys to trauma or of dogs that ingested explosives. Is that ethically acceptable? Perhaps not. But useful data was obtained, which automatically demolishes your thesis. Was this data worth the harm experienced by sentient creatures? Perhaps not. But that is not the issue at hand.
(Part 1 of 5)
That's the problem here, it *is* part of the issue at hand. You can't simply isolate the [data derived] from the [way it was derived]. The philosophy of Bio-ethics would demand that the potential benefits of any action should outweigh the pain in causes any sentient life capable of feeling pain, otherwise it crosses the line of "necessary evil" into something more sadistic.
I think the biggest problem is that live-testing experiments are designed more on the most "efficient" way to gather data rather than the most humane way… resulting in these Frankenstein-ish experiments. A better balance has to be struck.
I have no problem in acknowledging that there are specific experimental methods that are cruel and that there are certain scientists and institutions that ignore the fact that they are dealing with sentient creatures. But what the article here is presenting is that not only is animal experimentation always cruel, wrong, and immoral, it also fails to generate any useful scientific data, which is flat out false. You will notice that I have not tried to debate on the moral calculus of how much suffering a non-human animal can take that would amount to the suffering of a human being. That is tough to parse, which is why I avoided it. What I am criticizing here is the misrepresentation of science under the guise of trying to improve scientific output.
Animal experimentation is here to stay. It is not just for the sake of efficiency or expediency. Rather, it is the most accurate method we have for now short of a direct human testing. The methods proposed by the article: in vitro cell culture, computer modeling, etc., studies based on these methods always have to be redone in vivo because there are real life factors that we cannot determine that are present in real working organ systems. Even the reagents used in cell culture are anathema to veganism. If this article would be your guide to supporting medical research, you'd be left supporting none. Animal cell culture requires nutrient media derived from chemicals such as fetal bovine serum, which comes from the blood of a cow fetus. This serum is chemically undefined. That is, we simply don't know exactly what's inside. But this serum is necessary to keep in vitro cells alive. Would that these facts about how experimental design is actually performed were at least mentioned in the article, then maybe a fair debate could have been had regarding the ethics of experimenting on animals.
Thanks for giving good counter-points to the original essay's contentions. But I'd like to give the author the benefit of the doubt since advocacy pieces, by nature, aren't really supposed to be balanced in perspective since they are, after all, fighting an uphill battle against status quo.
I agree that animal experimentation will never go away. In all honesty, if its a question of hurting an animal to save my life or the life of someone I care for, I wouldn't hesitate. I read up a lot on how new cancer treatments (chemo, radiation therapy…) were being lab-tested on animals and they were enough to turn anyone's stomach. Cancer research, after all, is in the business of finding the quickest, most efficient way of of killing living tissue. Its a pretty gruesome business any way you look at it. But I also know a lot of cancer survivors who wouldn't be here today without that research… so that's where I stand.
I'm not exactly sure what the author is advocating at this point – outright banning animal testing, moderating its use, or merely informing people of the costs of medical research. For me, the best approach would be to require companies that do use animal testing to label it on their products like they do with GMO food – let the consumers decide for themselves whether they'd patronize a product that was tested on animals and how. If it was a life-saving drug, people would still take it but people buying vanity cosmetic products might think twice if they were properly informed.
I would support proper labeling and disclosure. As would I support informing creationists who require the use of antibiotics, the production of which involves knowledge derived from evolutionary biology. Let's all put our money where our mouth is.