We’re very pro-cuddly creatures in our house. Some of our most treasured companions are very realistic fluffy bears, dogs, otters, giraffes, lions and so on and our favourite stories usually feature a talking duck or a hungry caterpillar or something. We’re also generally down on unmotivated cruelty to animals – we don’t support the squashing of bugs or the kicking of dogs, for instance. We do, however, support animal testing.
The animal rights people are wrong. They’re wrong because their description of nature, of our relationship with other species, is infantile and anthropomorphic. It depends on a simplified (Disneyfied) taxonomy that gives all species (usually just the furry ones, actually) an erroneous equivalence. In their version of the top end of the food chain, rights invented in complicated, literate human cultures are arbitrarily extended to parts of the natural world that cannot ever properly own them.
The human species is… well… just that: a species – a small part of nature’s awesome unity. Our relationship with other species is like that of other top predators. We make complicated, highly-evolved use of the species below us in the chain, like those parasitic moths who persuade poisonous ants to feed them through their pupal stage and like the cuckoo whose use of stupider bird species is well known.
Opposing the use of animals in medical and scientific tests suggests a sympathetic relationship to animals. In fact it means quite the reverse: an arbitrary separation of the animals from the humans. In the animal rights campaigners’ world animals are not part of the same, impossibly rich and productive system as humans, they’re something separate and different, deserving only of our pity and protection.
I don’t want to naturalise animal cruelty: morality (another complicated human invention) still applies and so does ecological common sense. Destroying animal species for profit and abusing animals for fun are just wrong but making scientific use of the living world in the pursuit of knowledge is a proper and profoundly natural thing to do.
Hhmm…I reckon your on thin ice there Mr B…but you are entitled to your opinion. It is actually possible to conduct testing without suffering or cruelty to or indeed on animals…it’s just that in most cases it is more convenient to. Big money, big politics, big debate.
Dunno about walking on thin ice – but you might get a brick through the window in the current scheme of things. Thought police all around. (BTW, I’m really just testing coComment here!)
Are you sure the kids support animal testing?
Steve, I am REALLY ANGRY that you’ve decided to include me in your latest rant, and not even to bother to check if I agree. When I get an appointment with you, I’ll tell you to your face, but don’t bloody say “we” when you mean “you”, the kids are with me on this. Bloody cheek.
I asked Billie at the weekend if she “supported animal testing” like her dad. And she said “What’s that?” And I said “Your dad thinks it’s good to put shampoo in bunnies eyes.” If you could have seen the look on her little face.
I expect she knows how they feel, having had her hair washed by her father.
You have some “impressive” trackback for this entry my friend:
http://www.bowbrick.com/mt/bob.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=1219