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From International Socialism 2 : 54, Spring 1992, pp. 145–152.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
I am a biologist, not a philosopher, and I experiment with animals in the laboratory. I study the mechanisms of memory, and my research is funded by the Medical Research Council, Science Research Council and various foundations and charities in Britain.
The animal rights movement is a coalition of forces which runs back for at least a century, but in its present form has developed particularly over the course of the last 20 years. It runs from older established organisations such as the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, through to groups such as the Animal Liberation Front and Advocates for Animals, which are more activist and concerned with the liberation, as they call it, of animals in laboratories.
In order to understand the origins of the animal rights movement you have to understand something historically about the relationship of humans (people and social organisations) to non-human animals – philosophically, politically and economically. There is a lot of romantic nonsense talked about how in pre-capitalist societies there were different sorts of relationships of humans to animals – much more harmonious – than exist in capitalist or even feudal society. Yet what is abundantly clear is that from the beginning of the Judaeo-Christian tradition (as shown in the Bible, in the history of agriculture, and in the history of the domestication of animals) there is a very strong belief that humans should have domination over nature. This idea and practice of domination runs right the way through the development of Civilisation from its earliest possible times. But it was encapsulated very strongly with the birth of modern – that is Western – science which began contemporaneously with the birth of modem capitalism, back in the middle 17th century. The commitment of the scientific method was unequivocally to the domination of nature. It was humanity’s right, according to the ideologues of both modern science and capitalism, to extract from nature, whether animate or inanimate, all the wealth, all the riches and all the extractable products that nature could provide. This ethic of the domination of nature thus goes right to the heart of the growth of the scientific method from the 17th century onwards.
Modern science however shifted the philosophical base of the problem of the relationship between humanity and other animals, between biology and human life. If humans were biological organisms, and they were subject to the same laws of biology as all other animals, what happened to the soul, to human consciousness and to those things that the Christian religion was committed to believe were uniquely human? The answer given by Descartes, one of the founders of modem science, was that humans were biological organisms just like any other organisms, but differed from other biological organisms because as well as being biological they had a soul which was locked somewhere in the brain. This meant they had the breath of God within them, which gave them certain sorts of divine rights and divine responsibilities. The point of Descartes saying this was to deny that non-human animals had any sort of soul at all: For Descartes the cry of pain of an animal was the squeak of a rusty cog in a machine.
The work of the early physiologists seemed to accept Descartes’ view of animal pain as the squeak of a rusty cog. Despite the importance of much of this work for medicine, it was not for nothing that physiology became known as ‘the science of pain’. In order to explore animals, particularly in the days before anaesthetics, the whole range of activities which the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection calls vivisection began to be developed. Undoubtedly the sort of experiments that were conducted, although they revealed a great deal of scientific information, also caused a substantial amount of pain. They could even be termed brutal (although perhaps relatively no more brutal than the way hospitals treated their patients at that time, nor the way most workers were treated in the factories of the industrial revolution).
Since the 1939–45 war, and increasingly in the last decades, a deeper and more critical view of science has begun to develop, both amongst radical movements and the left. This criticism sees science, far from being beneficial and progressive, as arcane, mysterious, damaging to global ecology, damaging to humans and as intervening oppressively in human and non-human life. Thus the whole thesis of the domination of nature, which had hitherto gone unquestioned amongst bourgeois or socialist critics, began to come under very sharp criticism from a variety of movements – the peace movement, CND, the ecology movement and, of course, the animal rights movement. These oppositions to the activity and products of science appear to have a sort of coherence. However, I believe that far from having coherence they are very divergent, and the argument put against science as being sexist and racist and concerned with the propagation of a class structure of society has to be very sharply separated from those arguments that the animal rights movement uses against scientific work and experimentation.
I therefore don’t wish to defend factory farming, which I see as an abuse which comes out of a determination to extract maximum profit from the ways in which animals are handled. I don’t defend either a substantial proportion of the research that is done on drugs and the development of new products, which are often concerned primarily with innovation to increase extractable value or to circumvent patent laws rather than responding to genuine human needs – insofar as such needs can ever be distinguished from those of the social order that promotes them. What I do believe, however, is if you want new drugs and new products you have to research their safety.
It is abundantly clear that, firstly, animals and humans form a biological continuum. The same sort of biochemicals which constitute the biological and physiological processes of our human bodies, constitute those of animal bodies as well. The major difference between human animals and non-human animals is that humans have larger and better developed brains. We have the capacity of speech, to make and manipulate tools, and because of this we can create social organisations. Therefore humans have a history whereas non-human animals on the whole only have a past. This technological and social history is primarily what divides human from non-human animals, not anything unique about our biology or theirs.
Many of the drugs and medical treatments which can now be used to treat human diseases exist because of animal experimentation. Treatment for diseases like diabetes, the knowledge of immunology and of immunisation which lie at the basis of transplants and much preventative medicine, and the development of most surgical procedures and drugs, have been contingent on doing animal experiments. There was no alternative in the past, and there is still no alternative now, to the use of animals in this context. It is particularly true in the case of the area in which I work – the brain sciences. The animal rights movement sometimes argues there are alternatives to animal experimentation, such as using tissue culture or bacteria. But for the study of the conditions which are the major causes of distress, disease and death in contemporary industrial society – schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, neurological diseases, strokes and so on – you have to study animals which have brains.
The alternative of course is precisely that – to work on humans – and that is the point the animal rights people want to make. They say that the rights of a non-human animal are identical with the rights of a human, therefore there is no difference between working on animals and working on humans, so why not experiment on humans? To take a position which is opposed to this they call ‘speciesism’ and they use the term in the same way that racism and sexism is used. I wish to say that I am, unashamedly, a speciesist. That is I have an unqualified loyalty to the human species and I think it is perfectly possible to draw a dividing line between human and non-human animals which makes sense to everyone but the most perverse.
The moment you put the argument in that way it becomes clear that there are a number of paradoxes. Firstly, no animal, other than the human animal, worries about the rights of others – a cat doesn’t worry about the rights of a mouse before killing it. This makes the whole concept of rights a very puzzling one because it is not the animals who are demanding rights, but the humans who are conferring the rights on animals. So we humans, because we are a particular sort of biological organism, are turning round and saying that you cat, monkey, rat have particular sorts of rights. The argument, therefore, is not about the rights of animals, but about the duties of humans. And this is fundamentally different than the way the argument of rights is used in the context of political and social struggles. When the oppressed subjects of history (black people, women, gays and lesbians) rise up and demand rights they are speaking in their own name, and not having rights conferred upon them by some white middle class male elite. Rights are won in political struggle, by the subjects of history becoming articulate by arguing for themselves and making their own history. This is fundamentally different from the way the term rights is used by animals activists. I cannot accept the dishonest and hypocritical argument that animals have rights in the same sense that we use that term for social and political struggles.
As a socialist and a Marxist I am uneasy with the whole concept of rights in this context. Rights are always posed in this debate as if they are some sort of absolute. That is, as if there is an absolute right to freedom of speech, absolute right of animals not to be molested and so on. But this is not the way the world works. Rights are constantly in conflict. The rights of one animal interfere with the rights of another (there is a problem about rights versus dinner!). This is a fundamental biological principle – all organisms exist simultaneously in competition and co-operation with all others. Even if you go naked and deny yourself not merely animal food but also remove all animal fibre from your body, your body is still an ecological battleground for many other organisms. Even if you lie down and die, a variety of different predators, from bacteria to scavenging mammals, will compete for the right to devour your flesh. This is the way biology works. One of my major criticisms of the animal rights movement and the ecology movement in general, is of their belief that somehow if you go back to a pre-industrial, pre-capitalist society you would live in a world where everything is bright and beautiful; that only man was vile, that the world was cooperative and non-competitive before human intervention. Yet before human beings existed in the world species were evolving; many organisms and entire species were dying out. This is a fundamental feature of evolution. The fact is that rights conflict, and because they conflict you cannot get out of the problem of making choices simply by saying that animals have rights. You have to make a value judgment about the value of human life against the value of non-human life.
The animal rights movement is a very complex conglomeration of forces both of the right and the left. Indeed it is an open secret that it has been systematically penetrated by many groups of the extreme right. In Milton Keynes, for example, members of the local animal rights group include supporters of an openly Nazi group calling itself the November 9th Movement, the date of Hitler’s infamous Kristallnacht. The animal rights movement has been used as a cover for attacks on Jewish and Muslim style animal killings. It is worth remembering that the history of the movement is a fairly unsavoury one in a variety of ways. The only country ever to ban animal experiments completely was Nazi Germany during the 1930s. There is also an element within the animal rights movement, among so called ‘deep ecologists’, which is profoundly anti-human which would rather save chimpanzees and whales than humans.
To conclude. I have many criticisms of many aspects of science and its uses under capitalism. I insist that what we need to try and do is to create a science as well as a society which lives harmoniously with nature and understands that nature evolves, that eco-systems are complex and cannot be understood experimentally or appreciated in the crassly reductionist terms which modem science, as it developed under capitalism, has sponsored. But I also insist that we cannot avoid making moral, political and social choices by wrapping up arguments in cant about animal rights. If we want to save human lives, animal experimentation is still necessary.
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