(Vivisection: The dissection of, or otherwise experimenting on, a living animal.)
Well, this week we learn that chimps can subtract numbers as well as add, which had led to some idiot scientists wondering whether this means we shouldn't be experimenting on them. The fact that they also feel pain and fear like us doesn't seem to even register as important. If sub-normal intelligence and lack of understandable language is therefore the criteria, can I make a suggestion: perhaps we should experiment on babies, people with learning dissabilities, old folk with dementia? No? Of course not, because that would make us like Dr Aribert Heim, the nazi concentration camp doctor who was able to carry out his horrific 'experiments' because he regarded the Jewish people as animals.
1 comment:
Absolutely total lack of empathy is what causes these horrors. I'm sure that most of the people using animals for research genuinely beieve that, rather like the poor of old, animals do not suffer as they themselves would.
It's forty years this year since I was first "moved on" while protesting outside a fur shop. Four decades since I last knowingly or intentionally ate meat or animal bits and, since I discovered vegetarian shoes (shop in Brighton) about ten years ago I no longer "have" to wear animal skins either.
Wearing non-animal skin shoes and belts is an absolute hoot when a ... difference of opinion or values ... arises with someone who objects to my beliefs (and an amazing and surprising number of people get really spontaneously worked up about them!) Their last salvo is always, but always, to look down and triumhantly say "Aha! but you're wearing leather...".
Showing them the label usually makes them slink away.
Post a Comment