The “Animal Rights” Movement’s Cruelty to Humans
Alex Epstein writes in a press release from AynRand.org:
The “animal rights” movement has pulled off a deadly deception: promote a vicious, anti-human policy, while feigning benevolent, compassionate motives. The deception takes the form of opposing life-saving medical research--in the name of opposing cruelty to animals.Consider PETA’s ongoing campaign against Covance, a company that conducts vital medical research on animals to fight diseases such as breast cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s. PETA is staging an elaborate, heavily backed PR effort claiming that Covance engages in gratuitous and unnecessary torture of monkeys. The centerpiece of the campaign is a 5-minute video allegedly proving PETA’s accusations.
In fact, PETA’s effort is a classic smear campaign. Many of the “abuses” it documents--such as the use of restraints or delivering drugs through nasal tubes--are necessary to effectively administer drugs to animals. And the few examples of seemingly inappropriate behavior they find, such as the bizarre taunting of monkeys by a few Covance employees, are treated as pervasive industry practice--even though it took a PETA operative (operating illegally within Covance) over 10 months to cull a mere handful of such instances.
No sane person seeks to inflict needless pain on animals. Such practices, where they exist, should be condemned. But anyone concerned for human life must unequivocally endorse the rightness of using animals in medical research.
Animal research is absolutely necessary for the development of life-saving drugs, medical procedures, and biotech treatments. According to Nobel Laureate Joseph Murray, M.D.: “Animal experimentation has been essential to the development of all cardiac surgery, transplantation surgery, joint replacements, and all vaccinations.” Explains former American Medical Association president Daniel Johnson, M.D.: “Animal research--followed by human clinical study--is absolutely necessary to find the causes and cures for so many deadly threats, from AIDS to cancer.”
Millions of humans would suffer and die unnecessarily if animal testing were prohibited. But this is exactly what PETA and other “animal rights” organization seek. They believe that all animal research should be banned, including research conducted as humanely as possible (the declared and scrupulously practiced policy of most animal researchers).The founder of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, has declared unequivocally that animal research is “immoral even if it’s essential” and that “Even painless research is fascism, supremacism.” When questioned what her movement’s stance would be if animal tests produced a cure for AIDS, Newkirk responded: “We’d be against it.” Chris DeRose, founder of the group Last Chance for Animals, writes: “If the death of one rat cured all diseases, it wouldn’t make any difference to me.”
The goal of the “animal rights” movement is not to stop sadistic animal torturers; it is to sacrifice human well-being for the sake of animals. This goal is inherent in the very notion of “animal rights.” According to PETA, the basic principle of “animal rights” is: “animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment”--they “deserve consideration of their own best interests regardless of whether they are useful to humans.” This is in exact contradiction to the requirements of human survival and progress, which demand that we kill animals when they endanger us, eat them when we need food, run tests on them to fight disease. To ascribe rights to animals is to contradict the purpose and justification of rights: the protection of human interests. Rights are moral principles governing the interactions of rational, productive beings, who prosper not in a world of eat or be eaten, but a world of voluntary, mutually beneficial cooperation and trade.The death and destruction that would result from any serious attempt to pretend that animals have rights would be catastrophic--for humans--a prospect the movement’s most consistent members embrace. Newkirk calls human beings “the biggest blight on the face of the earth.” Freeman Wicklund of Compassionate Action for Animals declares: “We need a drastic decrease in human population if we ever hope to create a just and equitable world for animals.”
The central issue in the “animal rights” debate is not whether it is acceptable to torture animals, but whether it is proper to use them for human benefit. The “animal rights” movement’s emphasis on the senseless torture of animals--in the rare cases where it actually exists--is a red herring. It is a way of promoting opposition to life-saving animal research companies, and sympathy for themselves--so as to further their evil agenda of subjugating human beings to animals. They must not be allowed to get away with such dishonesty. What is needed is a principled, intellectual defense of the absolute right of animal experimentation, against the deadly notion of “animal rights.” Anything less is cruelty to humans.
I often wonder what the love child of Ayn Rand and Gangus Khan would be like...probably not an advocate of free health-care.
Though I have a problem taking any organization that wants to detonate any capitalism-free regions too seriously.
Jake at August 18, 2005 10:10 AM
Sane people do inflict needless pain on animals every day. Look at how veal are raised. Look at how fois gras is created, by force feeding ducks and geese with a 12-16 inch tube shoved down their throatsto bloat their liver. These are products that are simply for human pleasure, but result in millions of animals forced to live in tortuous conditions.
I think it is wildly inaccurate to suggest that PETA is trying to subjugate humans to animals, or that PETA is "anti-human". Also, Ingrid Newkirk's opinions do not seem so crazy when viewed through the lens of ahimsa, the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jainist philosophy of revering all life, not just human life.
eric at August 18, 2005 10:28 AM
PETA-philes' "reverence for life" doesn't preclude a love for abortion.
BTW, "ahimsa" means "non-violence", not "reverence for life". In Sanskrit, "himsa" is roughly speaking "harm", and "a-" means "none of that shit".
But like I always say, if you don't love animals enought to eat 'em, you don't really love animals.
Richard Bennett at August 18, 2005 11:53 AM
Ayn Rand was a hypocritical nutbag on a bunch of different fronts (especially the ones in her personal life), but, she had a lot of wisdom, too.
Amy Alkon at August 18, 2005 12:04 PM
Ayn Rand was a moron.
Richard Bennett at August 18, 2005 12:32 PM
Richard- you are defining ahimsa based upon Ghandis interpretation and utilization of the concept. Five sources I just checked (Websters, Encarta, Wikipedia and this webpage:
http://www.sivanandadlshq.org/teachings/ahimsa.htm#meaning ), and of course the Upanishads, all mention a reverence for all life.
But perhaps this is whipping a dead horse. See you in the temple- Hare Rama, Hare Rama.
eric the tambourine man at August 18, 2005 1:31 PM
I'm defining "ahimsa" based on what the Sanskrit word meant in Vedic times, when the only life that was considered sacred was human, and animals were most definitely NOT considered the equal of humans.
The Vedas prescribe animal sacrifices to remedy spiritual ills and to generally appease the gods, and vegetarianism wasn't widely practiced in India until the time of Adi Shankaracharya, 1000 AD or so. Shankara ordered Hindus to adopt the vegetarian diet because the cow sacrifices were bankrupting the villagers and depriving them of draft animals and milk. Among the most strict Hindu vegetarians today, dairy is a big part of the diet. As dairy farming involves the killing of young bulls, it's anything but an ahmisa practice from the animals' point of view.
Hollywood Hindus often have crazy ideas about what goes on in the old country, but they can be quickly disabused with a little study.
Richard Bennett at August 18, 2005 1:58 PM
Gee - if Richard says Ayn Rand was a moron, I'm going to have to find out why.
Imagine that you wake up in the Emergency Room. A nurse is wheeling you into an operating theater. The doctor steps up and informs you and your significant other of the situation: "You're very lucky. An accident like this usually kills immediately, but we got you here in time, and you probably won't be too much impaired if we can get to work right away. Don't worry. I've never done this surgery on anyone before, but I've done it dozens of times on the simulator."
Hey, PETA: I need to research a heart transplant procedure to save this ferret. What do I test on? You?
Now that would be real fairness!
Radwaste at August 18, 2005 2:42 PM
Ayn Rand was a gross simplifier who wrote for an audience of surly teenagers who probably equate "statism" with their moms making them clean up their rooms. Every teenager who reads goes through an Ayn Rand phase, and most grow out of it.
She annoys me.
Richard Bennett at August 18, 2005 2:53 PM
Speaking of surly teenagers, if I say pink, Richard feels compelled to come out full-tilt for blue. Ayn Rand didn't know quite so much as she thought she did about everything, but she did know a lot about some things. Take her thoughts on love, at this link:
http://angermanagement.mu.nu/archives/030028.html
I'll paste them in below:
"Love is a response to values. It is with a person's sense of life that one falls in love - with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person's character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul - the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness. It is one's own sense of life that acts as the selector, and responds to what it recognizes as one's own basic values in the person of another. It is not a matter of professed convictions (though these are not irrelevant); it is a matter of much more profound, conscious and subconscious harmony" (Romantic Manifesto 32).
"The actual emotion would be experienced precisely as an extreme awareness of the other person, which is the essence of falling in love. The conclusion conveys just that: 'and the sight was its own meaning and purpose, with no further end to reach.' This is the extreme state of being in love, where the issue is not sex, or any purpose, but (to put it colloquially) only the awareness that the loved one exists - which then fills the whole world" (The Art of Fiction 97).
"The most exclusive form - romantic love - is not an issue of competition. If two men are in love with the same woman, what she feels for either of them is not determined by what she feels for the other and is not taken away from him. If she chooses one of them, the 'loser' could not have had what the 'winner' has earned" (Virtue of Selfishness 55).
"To say 'I love you' one must first know how to say the 'I'" (Somewhere in The Fountainhead).
Amy Alkon at August 18, 2005 3:16 PM
Good God, that's some wordy and tedious crap. This is a lot better (and you can understand it because it's the way you feel about Little Fleabag:)
To know know know you
Is to love love love you
Just to see you smile
Makes my life worthwhile
And I do and I do
And I do and I do
And I do
Ayn Rand had no poetry in her sad little over-intellectualized life.
But I do agree with you on the wickedness of the man-hating femmorhoids, as you well know; it's just when you start talking about contracts for babies that you lose me on that subject.
Richard Bennett at August 18, 2005 3:27 PM
So - do you prefer Heinlein's idea? He said, roughly, that love is that condition in which the happiness of another is essential to your own. He made a great many other observations I admire, but they are tedious to type with no objective.
Radwaste at August 18, 2005 4:26 PM
Yeah, that's about the gist of it, and lots of other people have said the same thing, from your ancient Greek and Indian dudes to your Troubadours on up to your sages of Do-Wop.
Richard Bennett at August 18, 2005 4:59 PM
Now back to the subject...
Today I got my American Photo magazine, and there is a truly heart wrenching photo of a baby mangabey (a monkee from the Congo area) who refused to leave the side of his recently killed mother. The tribesman who killed the mother put the carcass and the wailing infant into his dug-out canoe, and I can not help but think that this baby has a reaction similar to what a human baby would have in a similar situation.
I have no doubt at all that animals have emotions. I have no doubt that some animals have emotions more finely developed than some humans. So it is morally wrong to subject animals to cruel experimentation, whether for cancer treatment or the like. You may justify it by saying it is necessary, and survival of the fittest, but that doesn't make it morally correct.
And I am not a vegetarian, though I wish I had the moral stamina to be. (Imagine how hard I would be to live with then!)
eric at August 18, 2005 5:37 PM
Emotions are highly over-rated.
Richard Bennett at August 18, 2005 5:55 PM
Well, then humanity is over-rated.
eric at August 18, 2005 6:29 PM
I've actually done some of this animal research.
I am a doctor and I have engaged in animal research for some projects in the past, though not in the last few years. I understand the general issues of rights and duties, the philosophical ideas on person-hood, and ethics and legal issues of biomedical research. The facility I worked in was a high security area, with many different species investigating many different diseases and issues.
What I remember is that the animals were always treated with great care because they were valuable as sources of answers to questions, cost precious money and were sentient creatures. Animals that are abused in any way are useless as experimental subjects. A tremendous amount of work and expense goes into running experiments on animal subjects and performing more than one type of investigation on an animal requires approval from a committee overseeing the experiments and more paperwork justifying the added procedure. Taking care of the animals is not a glamour job and often has great risks. It does draw employees from a lower socioeconomic sector of society, but consider what that employee risks when bitten or scratched by one of the animals. The animal handlers I worked with were very matter-of-fact about their work and I've never seen one of them take out their frustrations on one of the animals. The lab was one of the tightest run operations I've ever seen.
I don't regret my work. I know it had useful implications in balloon angioplasty. I do look at animal differently now since I know more about this that I would have otherwise.
Ayn Rand? She had some interesting ideas, but most of them seemed to work only as intellectual exercises and could not stand up to real world testing. Human behavior is both much too complex and much too simple to be so quaintly described. It reminds me of the quip about why Communism fell in the USSR--There's no money in it.
emkeane at August 18, 2005 10:15 PM
So much to think about....
I think God is we.
eric at August 18, 2005 10:22 PM
I agree with you about the importance of animal testing. And I think it should begin at home. Think of all the scratching humankind might be spared if you offered up your flea wracked cur-lette for some highly experimental, possibly toxic, de-infestation treatments.
Mao See Tung at August 19, 2005 2:31 AM
Eric, I understand you're struggling with the question of how and why humans would have a right to experiment on animals, all of us being the same at some level of sentimentality. And I admit, it's a hard question to answer ethically.
So I propose we declare a right to perform whatever experiments on other species as are needed for the sake of a species' well-being.
Consequently, dogs have the same right to experiment on humans that we have to experiment o dogs. This establishes equality and allows us to continue acting sensibly. And I would expect dog scientists to share their research results with us through publication in a peer-reviewed (or at least peer-sniffed) journal.
Happy?
Richard Bennett at August 19, 2005 12:09 PM
Richard- you know what they told you about skipping your meds....
eric at August 19, 2005 3:14 PM
Animal testing is not indiscriminate. Specific mechanisms are tested on each species. Offering up your or anyone else's' house pet is unrealistic and a hyperbolic and ignorant jab at animal testing. Animals have higher intelligence in general than most people give them credit. That does not make them "persons" in the same sense that the people who are contributing to this blog are "persons." Dogs and cats are used as animal subjects, and so are rats, rabbits, frogs, mice, goats, pigs, monkeys and apes, fruit flies, and many others. If you want to live in a world where you do not know anything about the safety of any kind of medical treatment or environmental safety issues, then end animal testing. We will soon regress to a brutish, dirty, and short existence that was enjoyed a few hundred years ago in western Europe and some places today we commonly call the third world.
I think that the next time you or someone you love gets sick, you will hope that medical science has some kind of fix for the situation, and if there is one, then it has been developed through animal testing.
emkeane at August 19, 2005 10:14 PM
Actually, I've quoted both the first Ayn Rand quote I posted and that Heinlein quote. And yes, she was verbose, so I edited her down to more readable essentials. It's fashionable to hate her, but she was quite wise about a few things.
And EmKeane, thank you for adding some reason on the medical side of things.
Amy Alkon at August 19, 2005 11:33 PM
Lucy is flea-less, thank you. She only caught them at the groomer, after being put in the cage they had Richard in previously.
Amy Alkon at August 19, 2005 11:35 PM
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Amy Alkon at August 19, 2005 11:35 PM
Hey, emkeane, can I get your next post well-done with a side o' bacon?
Mao See Tung at August 20, 2005 1:41 AM
It's much more likely that Little Fleabag brought her latest infestation back from France, as I don't frequent Hollywood personally.
Oddly enough, animals already benefit from drugs tested on animals and even on humans. You'll notice that vets prescribe some of the same antibiotics for dogs and cats as for humans, and I'm pretty sure these drugs weren't originally developed for the animal trade.
And of course we do test experimental drugs on humans at some point, and if we were to stop animal testing we'd have to pick up the slack by testing more extensively on prisoners or some other pool of Democrats.
Richard Bennett at August 20, 2005 4:24 AM
www.churchofeuthanasia.org -
we're anti-human and proud.
kittie at August 20, 2005 11:04 AM
'Lucy is flea-less, thank you. She only caught them at the groomer, after being put in the cage they had Richard in previously.'
hehe
Sheryl at August 20, 2005 6:01 PM
In Jack Russell Terrierland PETA stands for People Eating Tasty Animals.
Sheryl at August 20, 2005 6:02 PM
Kittie- this website has earned my eternal disgust. Mission accomplished.
Being anti-social and mocking victims of tragedy does nothing to elevate your own existence, and if life is that miserable, just do everyone a favor and euthanize your own worthless self. There is a difference between humor and narcissitic petulance.
What could you hope to accomplish?
eric at August 20, 2005 6:20 PM
Sheryl, how did you know?
Amy Alkon at August 20, 2005 11:34 PM
How did I know? Know about people eating tasty animals or Lucy's now flealess, is that a word, condition? Or how did I know that Richard was infested? That's a no brainer for anyone observing his irritability. As far as Lucy is concerned, I follow her well being as Kimo Baby has a major crush on her.
Sheryl at August 21, 2005 12:30 PM
Good job, Eric with the display of fellow-feeling so typical of the extreem anirmal right. I don't wish anyone dead, although there are probably a few "authentic" Mexican chefs near Pico who might think the supposedly flealess curlette carcas might make a tasty fillling for their taco de la dia eapecial.
Mao See Tung at August 21, 2005 6:35 PM
Leave a comment