Animal Rights

I just finished Animal Rights, A Very Short Introduction by David DeGrazia. You might be wondering why I read this book, even given that my reading list has become somewhat eclectic over the last year. Well, I recently designed an animal experiment for the first time. The experiment is for work. I won't go into many details for a number of reasons, but the experiment is about as humane as animal research can be and my experiment piggy-backs (no pun intended) on another set of experiments so really my experiment caused absolutely no harm. While my feeling is that if any animal research is justified, life saving research that does not involve torturing the animal would be it, I thought it would be interesting to see what others have to say about it since I'm still not completely sure how I feel about it.

As you might expect the book does not really resolve any issues, but it does clarify various positions on the topics of animal research and the conclusions that can be drawn from each position. While the author makes his favorite positions known, actually picking one is of course left to the reader. The book builds up the position that animals (at least higher level ones) do suffer and so they should have a certain level of rights. The major split is if animals, like humans, have rights that should not be dismissed even if it would overall benefit society (or even more protected since animals can never give informed consent). There is also a question of if there should be a sliding scale of rights based on the mental abilities of animals. Another interesting discussion point is if killing an animal harmlessly is cruelty or not. There are a number of ways of looking at it. One point is that humans have lots of future goals and killing a human stops them from accomplishing those goals vs an animal which does not have future goals. Another perspective is like opportunity cost - how much positive experience are you depriving the animal by killing it.

While I didn't pick a particular position, the book did help me put animal experiments in perspective. When I hear the term animal experiments my first thought is injecting awake animals with cosmetics to see what harm it causes. This is of course very different from the research I am involved with. One of the main points I got from the book is that I did way more harm to animals by eating meat for dinner than by my involvement in these experiments. When I jokingly suggested that I should keep track of how many animals are killed due to decisions I make, a co-worker pointed out that all the animals I eat would far out number anything else. What the book further illustrated is that the animals killed for food also have much worse lives and endure far greater suffering.

Overall I'm still a bit hesitant about animal testing and will try to minimize the amount required, but I now realize that small alterations to my eating habits would make a far bigger difference. I was hesitant to even talk about animal testing on this blog so I probably won't go into more details here, but if you are curious about it, I'm fine with discussing on the phone or over email.