Should Animals Be Used in Medical Research?

(Anne Doncaster)
Every year, Canadian scientists use more than 2 000 000 animals in medical experiments,
teaching, and testing. These animals are confined in tiny cages behind closed doors until it
their turn to die. In the scientific literature, the animals are not sentient beings, but the tools
of the trade. They are sacrificed not because we have the right, but simply because we have
the might.
Researchers use animals in a misguided effort to dodge an ethical dilemma. From a scientific
perspective, humans are the only appropriate models for the study of human diseases or
injury. A human, after all, is not a rat, a dog, or a monkey. But scientific validity is not the
primary consideration. Public morality, quite properly, would not permit noxious
experiments to be performed on humans.
So animals are subjected to such procedures as induced disease and injury, invasive surgery,
electric shock, poisoning, burns, and genetic manipulation. Some are given addictions to
alcohol and drugs; others are deprived of food, water, and social and environmental
stimulation.
The fate of these animals is left entirely in the hands of the researchers. Most countries using
large numbers of animals in research have national legislation to protect them, but only three
Canadian provinces have laws on the treatment of laboratory animals and, in any case, these
laws are inadequate. Elsewhere, there is only a voluntary system that operates under the
misnomer “Canadian Council on Animal Care” (CCAC). Although CCAC’s many levels of peer
review can sound impressive to the uninitiated, each level is dominated by members of the
research community, and the deliberations of the committees are confidential. For laboratory
animals, the researchers are judge, jury, and executioner---a blatant conflict of interest.
But discussions of the proper use of animals ignore the basic tenet of the animal-rights
movement: that the use of animals is morally wrong. Philosophers have failed to find a
justification for it. To legitimize our current double standard of morality, they would have to
identify morally relevant characteristics that humans possess and animals lack.
Supporters of animal research argue that animals, but not humans, can be used in
experiments because humans are more intelligent. But if intelligence is the criterion on which
we determine moral worth and exclude humans from experimentation, we immediately
encounter a dilemma. Some humans, the severely brain damaged, are less intelligent than
many animals. Experiments on the less intelligent humans would rightly lead to a public
outcry. It is therefore logically and morally inconsistent for researchers to experiment upon
the more intelligent animals.
A similar dilemma remains when researchers substitute other criteria for distinguishing
animals from humans, such as self-awareness, moral behaviour, or the capacity to participate
in a social contract. All of these are missing in some humans and present in some animals.
The unavoidable conclusion is that painful or harmful experiments upon animals are as
morally unacceptable as they would be if they were performed upon humans.
The research industry claims that much good comes from animal research. Yet, this blind
insistence that the ends justify the means has already been exposed as an excuse for
unconscionable cruelty. During World War II, highly respected German and Japanese
scientists justified experiments on prisoners on the ground that their country’s own soldiers
benefited. The subjects were considered subhuman.
I have seen some Canadian labs, and their resemblance to concentration camps is striking.
Whatever we might be gaining from this abuse of animals, we are losing something far more
important---compassion, honour, and decency.