Letters to the Editor
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medical advances
jackson, Your sadist gets pleasure from animals' pain. Scientists do not. They do get pleasure from saving lives, which their studies do accomplish.
I never said animals don't suffer pains in labs, I'm not naive. However, what the scientist does is in NO way comparable to a sadist. Animals are always anesitized before any procedure.
It is not possible to develop a vaccination for polio and other great medical accomplishments without some animals getting hurt. I think it's a fair tradeoff. I'm willing to infict some pain on animals so that millions of people's lives can be saved. I DO think the lives of millions of people are more important to society than 100 rats.
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Interesting Parallels
If these protesters were beating the cars of abortion doctors who performed dialation and extraction, I have no doubt that the fawning apologists for SHAC would be all for throwing the book at them. It's only terror when you don't agree with the cause, I suppose.
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Justification and Limits of Animal Testing
First I'd like to say that these letters are another example of the uselessness of blogs. There is very little dialogue here. Several of these posts involve little more than name calling, and too many others are part of a useless debate over what actually goes on in these labs. Neither myself nor the majority of people who write or read these posts have or will ever see the inside of a research lab, so even if you try to tell us what exactly happens, we'll never really know who exactly is closer to the truth.
Alright, now to the main points of this post:
1) I do not believe that animals have the same rights that humans do. In my view, only humans have natural rights. I believe this because if I had to choose whether or not a human or animal dies/suffers, I would choose the animal every time. The moral code that I live by is simple (although not always easy to put into practice), and it is this: Do good towards people (humans) and avoid doing harm to people (humans). This code is not exactly the words of any religious source, but I feel it is what the morality of most major religions boils down to. So, do I go home every night and torture helpless animals, and do I support others who may do the same? No, I do not, because I feel this is in conflict with my moral code. Why should animal abuse conflict with a moral code that only applies to actions towards humans? I as well as most people ascribe human characteristics to animals. In literary jargon, this is called "personification". Because animals are capable of displaying a limited range of human characteristics, I feel that it would be only a small leap for a sadist to go from torturing/killing creatures with a limited range of human characteristics to torturing/killing creatures with the full range of human characteristics (i.e. - humans). In terms of this moral code (do good, avoid evil towards people), inflicting pain or death on animals is only justifiable if doing so benefits people to a degree commensurate with the pain inflicted upon the animal.
2) Experimental treatments (treatments include surgical as well as medical procedures) of conditions like broken bones, chronic pain, heart failure, poisoning, etc., requires a model of the system. Testing the treatment on a target system (humans) is an eventual necessity, but beginning testing on humans when lethal defects in the treatment could have been revealed by testing on other models is immoral. Animals still provide a better model than computers (I know, I’m a computer engineer) as well as in-vitro testing, which does not model the entire system.
3) This is not so much a point as it is a question I would like to pose to those of you who are opposed to animal testing, whether or not you support violence to achieve your end (which is what I actually felt was the main point of this article). Most of the rhetoric used by the animal rights movement focuses on the most extreme forms of animal testing. Some examples cited in these e-mails include: breaking bones, pouring toxic/caustic chemicals down the animals’ throats, or applying chemicals to the skin of an animal to determine how their skin will react. My question is this: If you support any kind of animal testing at all (i.e. – you are not just using the most extreme cases of animal testing to shock people into opposing the less seemingly sadistic forms of animal testing) then where do you draw the line? This is not a rhetorical question. I really would like to know.
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being beaten with ax handles HURTS
>>>>but to call them a serious terrorist threat is hyperbole>>
I hardly call being beaten with ax handles hyperbole. Physical violence, physical threats and intimidation are terrorist threats.
Read the article more closely:
"In 2001 David Blakinsop, as activist affiliated with SHAC and two other men approached Huntingdon's managing director, Brian Cass, as he arrived home from work in England, where Huntingdon was based at the time, and beat him with wooden ax handles. When a neighbor tried to intervene, one of the men sprayed tear gas in his face. Cass was left with a three-inch gash in his head.""
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SHAC=Terrorism
ANY organization that attempts to use violence, threats, intimidation and vandalism to force others to adhere to their point of view IS an extremist terrorist organization.
It makes no difference if said organization is espousing radical Islam, or animal rights, as soon as you cross the line into violent criminal activity, you are wrong. Anyone who supports or engages in violence that aims to intimidate others into enforcing their beliefs is wrong and should be treated as a criminal.
Not everyone shares the same beliefs about what animal cruelty is, and just because someone disagrees, or does business with someone that disagrees, should not make them a target of violence.
It is shameful that organizations like SHAC, resort to violence instead of staging legal protests or legal information campaigns.
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I'm not a member of the hard right -
- but I think the idea of "rights" for animals is absurd. It sounds good at first blush - no-one likes the idea of cats and dogs suffering needlessly, but where does it stop? First of all, which animals? Only animals with brains? Or all animals? Animal rights activists say that the rest of us are drawing an arbitrary line between us and lower animals; accepting that argument, where is the line? Is there even a line at all? Do bacterium have the right to multiply inside my body, and is it murder to take antibiotics? What about plants? If it's wrong to kill and eat a chicken or a shrimp, why is it all right to kill and eat a plant? And if were going to extend human rights to animals, what about moral responsibility? Surely, if it is wrong for humans to kill, it is also wrong for animals to kill. Will we bring bears and alligators to court for murder when they inevitably attack and kill humans? And rights don't stop at who you are allowed to kill. What about displacing animals to build your house? What about pets?
I'm am not asking these questions to be flip; if you're going to take a the uncompromising position that hardcore, radical animal rights groups like SHAC adhere to, you have to explore questions like that seriously, especially when you break out the axe handles.