Unliberated Creatures of the European Union

The European Union’s Directive of 2010 “on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes” laid down the rules and standards for animal research in all the member states. Its Article 58 required a review of the Directive’s own success to be issued no later than 10 November, 2017. So here it now is, or rather they are:  the summary Report from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, etc., of 10 pages or so, and the rather opaquely titled Staff Working Document, containing “more detailed analysis of the different consultation activities and other information sources used”, and covering about 145 pages.

Another mighty deposit of conscientious bureaucracy, then: important, because this represents the progressive front for animals in laboratories, setting and monitoring standards which practitioners in Europe will be expected to keep and will therefore have a professional interest in persuading institutions in other countries to adopt (and this does happen, to a modest extent); not very important, on the other hand, because the review comes too soon to be useful. The Directive itself came into force back in 2013, but the last of the transpositions into national law was not completed until 2015. Besides, compliance with some important parts of the Directive (notably “common standards for accommodation and care”) was not obligatory until January 2017. In short, the Report concludes that “trends in animal use at EU level will not be known before 2019.” And the most that can be deduced from all the “consultation activities” deployed in the Staff Working Document is that the Directive “is generally considered to be a sound foundation for the regulation of animals used in scientific research.” 

So these texts make a disappointing and laborious read. There’s a great mass of comment from nations and institutions, but most of it is digested into generalities, and all of it is anonymized. Occasional details do suddenly remind the dazed reader that behind all this de-personalized discourse are real places and experiences, and real animals. See under ‘Sharing organs and tissues’, for instance: the 2010 Directive (Article 18) stated that “Member States shall facilitate, where appropriate [every bureaucrat’s get-out-of-jail-free word], the establishment of programmes for the sharing of organs and tissues of animals killed”; so now we’re told, by way of compliance, that “announcing planned animal killing in one establishment by an internal calendar assists planning.” Through the fog of abstract style you can descry a strange and telling bit of laboratory life there.

Or see under ‘Re-homing’. This is a practice authorized by the Directive (Article 19) provided that “appropriate measures” have been taken to safeguard the welfare of the animals. Yet it seems that out of all the many millions of animals that have passed through Europe’s laboratories during the review period of four years or so, this one possible way of coming out alive has been granted to “only a few dogs and even fewer rabbits”.

It’s a miserable picture, and it reminds me of a poignant scene in the 1883 novel Heart and Science by Wilkie Collins which I shall quote as a digression (also as a very fine piece of writing). It comes near the end of the story, when the vivisector Dr Benjulia, defeated as a scientist and despairing as a man, has gone into his laboratory for the last time, watched at a distance by one of his servants:

The door was opened again; the flood of light streamed out on the darkness. Suddenly the yellow glow was spotted by the black figures of small swiftly-running creatures—perhaps cats, perhaps rabbits—escaping from the laboratory. The tall form of the master followed slowly, and stood revealed watching the flight of the animals. In a moment more, the last of the liberated creatures came out—a large dog, limping as if one of its legs was injured. It stopped as it passed the master, and tried to fawn on him. He threatened it with his hand. “Be off with you, like the rest!” he said. The dog slowly crossed the flow of light, and was swallowed up in darkness.

The last of them that could move was gone.

As Collins says in his preface to the novel, “I leave the picture to speak for itself.”

Returning to the report: there are positive things to find in these documents. One reason for the delays in putting the Directive into effect is that some of the member states started off far behind the new standards. In such countries there may have been “no previous requirements or formal structures for project evaluation”. For them, even partial compliance with the EU rules for training and supervision will have meant “better animal welfare, better recognition of pain, distress and suffering, and better understanding of animal behaviours and needs.” The change effected by the EU Directive may have been slight in the United Kingdom, but its effect upon the sum total of EU animal research has been very beneficial.

Good evidence is provided, too, for the report’s claim that “the level of challenge to animal studies has increased” – i.e. that research projects and the laboratories themselves really are subject to stricter assessments – even though, as the animal rights groups quoted in the report (they do get a say in it) rightly protest, there is no record of projects failing altogether to pass the test. The evidence comes in the form of complaints from some of the institutions: “delays to projects have been observed”, “scientists try to avoid doing animal experiments because of the administrative burden”, “the process [of ethical review, etc.] has limited some research at their institutes”, and “The directive has necessitated closure of some animal units as they did not comply with the requirements.” These grievances, assuming them to be sincere, are surely significant and welcome.

In its preamble, paragraph 10, the Directive calls itself “an important step towards achieving the final goal of full replacement of procedures on live animals for scientific and educational purposes as soon as it is scientifically possible to do so”. But as the Staff Working Document admits, so far during the period of the Directive’s authority there has been “no apparent reduction in animal use”. (And perhaps even that phrase is really a euphemism for ‘increase’, such as there has indeed been in the U.K.) Nor, even in the case of non-human primates, the most officially controversial of the animal research victims, does a reduction seem likely in the near future, for the report accepts the advice of the SCHEER ‘Opinion’ (reported in this blog on 17 July), and accordingly states that “no phasing-out timetable for the use of non-human primates is proposed.” So the Directive’s paragraph 10 optimism reappears now with a subtle re-direction: “The scientific community need to continue and improve efforts to explain why at this stage the use of animals in scientific procedures is still necessary.” Settle it with PR, then, and indeed one of the respondents (from the U.K. I would guess) mentions “significant progress in this area” on the part of the U.K.’s ‘Concordat on Openness’. Britain showing the way in modern vivisection, as usual; that it’s not yet the way forward is what one evidently has to learn from this 2017 review.

 

Notes and references:

The Report can be read here:   http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1510252227435&uri=COM:2017:631:FIN

and the Staff Working Document here:   http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1510252227435&uri=SWD:2017:353:FIN

and the EU Directive 2010/63 here:     http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2010:276:0033:0079:en:PDF

The passage from Heart and Science, a Story of the Present Time (1883) comes in Chapter 62. The novel was discussed in this blog on 21 November 2015 at https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2015/11/21/the-real-benjulia/

The SCHEER report is reviewed in this blog at

https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2017/07/17/brothers-and-cousins/

Albert Schweitzer in Time of War

One hundred years ago this week, the slaughterous battle of Passchendaele, on the Western Front in Flanders, was coming to its end. In Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘Memorial Tablet’, one of the men whose “gilded” names are cut into this imagined memorial says

                        I died in hell –         
(They called it Passchendaele)

And of course they took the animals to hell with them, as Douglas Culham’s stygian painting very well shows. Then and since, however, we’ve always done our best to send the animals there ahead of ourselves, by using them in preparatory research. The British military science establishment at Porton Down was established in the year before Passchendaele. It has been using animals ever since, to test the known and the merely feared resources of modern warfare. In 2016, its own centenary, it got through 2,745 of them, including 116 monkeys.

Well, but as the Ministry of Defence habitually says, “Our armed forces could not be provided with safe and effective protective measures without this research.” And an official account of Porton Down speaks of “the constantly evolving threat posed by chemical and biological weapons”, reminding us that not just our armed forces are in danger; evidently we should all be afraid. In such an alarming context, how are we to give our minds to the welfare of mice, pigs, or even monkeys?

To go backwards in war yet further, this was a question which the German pioneer of animal rights Christian Dann felt that he had to answer when he published his book Bitte der armen Thiere [petition of the poor animals] shortly after the Napoleonic Wars in which, as usual, the peoples of Europe had caused each other so much death and destruction. He said, “if men have brought themselves so to destroy each other, that is because they have not been trained in compassion from their youth onwards.” In fact times of war are really, he said, the exactly right time to review our obligations to other animals, as the premise for a recuperation of our ethics in general.

Or rather, that’s what Albert Schweitzer reports Dann as saying (I haven’t read Dann’s book). It was also what Schweitzer himself was doing, speaking out about our relation with animals boldly and conspicuously amid the ruins of war. For the allusion to Dann comes in the series of sermons which, as a Lutheran pastor, Schweitzer gave in the church of St Nicolai, Strasbourg, immediately after the First World War.

The province of Alsace, of which Strasbourg is the chief city, had been under German rule when Schweitzer had departed from there some years earlier to set up a hospital in the jungle of Gabon, part of the French colony of Equatorial Africa. So when war broke out, he had been arrested by the French, and then deported and interned as an enemy alien. Eventually he was released back to his home village of Günsbach, situated more or less on the Western front and accordingly itself a victim of war:

Everywhere there were brick emplacements for machine guns! Houses ruined by gun-fire! Hills which I remembered covered with woods now stood bare. The shell-fire had left only a few stumps here and there. In the villages one saw posted up the order that everyone must always carry a gas-mark about with him.

From what was left of Günsbach, Schweitzer had moved to Strasbourg to work in the hospital there, and to act as pastor at St Nicolai. By now Alsace was part of France again, with all the human turbulence which that reversion of nationality entailed (including the departure of St Nicolai’s former anti-French pastor). And even now the slaughter was not over: the ‘Spanish’ flu was killing more people than the war itself had achieved. “the time of great misery that we face”, as Schweitzer summarized it in one of his sermons. [64]

Convinced that the war was not just a catastrophe in itself, but evidence of a general collapse of values, Schweitzer wanted to propose a “true, proper, inalienable ethic” [12] to replace the one which, when it came to the test, proved insubstantial and “fell away from us” with such disastrous consequences [11]. It was a theme he was preparing to argue in his great book The Philosophy of Civilization (1923). But here in Strasbourg he presents it already complete, from the pulpit of St Nicolai.

He begins with that précis of the commandments which, in the Gospel of St Mark, Jesus is said to have provided for a questioner: to love God, and to love your neighbour as yourself. What do these instructions really mean? Evidently we cannot love God as we might a human; rather, because “God is everlasting life” [8], what we should feel is “reverence for the incomprehensible, infinite, and living One”, for which ‘God’ is our chosen name. And loving our neighbour is an implication of this: our neighbour is a part of that One, just as we are. In fact, since all lives are part of it, all lives are neighbours to us. “In sum, therefore, the commandment of love means this: For you there are no strangers.” [8]

The first two examples of this “removal of the strangeness” between separated lives, which Schweitzer offers in his very first sermon, must surely have very much surprised his congregation: a snowflake (it was February 1919) and, first, a dead beetle. “The beetle that lies dead in your path – it was something that lived, that struggled for its existence like you, that rejoiced in the sun like you, that knew anxiety and pain like you.” [10] His listeners may well have smiled uneasily at this bold, almost tactless positioning of the beetle’s body among the countless war-dead gradually being memorialized all over Europe. But about the snowflake, Schweitzer spoke to them even more absolutely: “The snowflake, which fell upon your hand from boundless space, which glistened there, trembled, and died – that is you. Wherever you see life – that is you!”

To name this ethic that he was introducing, Schweitzer carried over the word which he had used to re-formulate the idea of love of God: ehrfurcht, which is usually (though not quite adequately) translated ‘reverence’. So in English the name was to be ‘reverence for life’: not the life only of our own side, as must have been the natural temptation at that time of “prejudice and nationalist passion”; nor only the life of our own kind; but every life, “no matter how externally dissimilar to our own” [11]. Life “radically viewed” is the phrase he uses in a later sermon. The beetle and the snowflake, then, as far away in kind as possible from humans, and in fact not even alive: these he must have chosen in order to jolt his congregation into recognizing the ambition of his ethic.

But I think he must also have chosen them to establish from the start the tragic setting for his essentially hopeful philosophy. For all the earnestness of the beetle’s struggle, or the beauty of the snowflake, nature itself is indifferent to their continuation. It creates and sacrifices impartially. It teaches to each individual “cruel egoism” [16], and pits life against life in helpless ignorance: a “ghastly drama”, Schweitzer elsewhere calls it. And this puzzle of contradictory interests becomes even more mystifying if we suppose God to be directing it. “Why is the God who reveals himself in nature the negation of all that we experience as ethical?” It’s a problem which Schweitzer considers insoluble: there can be no “harmonious philosophy of life”. This is the tragic setting.

However, in the coming of the human species Schweitzer sees “the great event in the development of life … Here, in one existence, life as such comes to consciousness of itself. Isolated individual existence ceases. Outside existence floods into ours.”  To know and to feel the true solidarity of all living things, as humans may, was a revolutionary novelty in the world, and for Schweitzer it is the foundation of ethics: to act upon this awareness is “our great mysterious duty in the world”. [23] And it’s in his third sermon that he sketches out the relations with other forms of life which it involves. Schweitzer wasn’t, of course, a vegan, not even a vegetarian (though he did abjure meat later in life), but he speaks with unhappiness even of those exploitations of other animals which he regarded (rather too readily, no doubt) as inevitable: “that in order to live we must offer the lower form of life to the higher is terrible”. [32] Unhappiness, but not resignation, for there are two things we can do about it.

Firstly, he says, we should indeed do things. He speaks of horses, chickens, cats, fish: “We must consider our responsibility in every individual case.” And again he outfaces the charge of sentimentality (“Do not be afraid to be ridiculous, but act!”) with examples taken from the farthest reaches from the human:

Keep your eyes open so that you do not miss any opportunity where you can be a redeemer! Do not go carelessly past the poor insect that has fallen into the water, for instance, but imagine what it means to struggle with a watery death. Help it to get out with a hook or a piece of wood … The worm on the hard street, onto which he has strayed by error, languishes because he cannot bore into it. Put him on soft earth or in the grass!

These detailed and unsensational actions are typical: not fine sentiment but “activist ethics” (Schweitzer’s phrase), and not morally calibrated by size, number, and relative importance, but unconditional. In this sermon, he even deplores the picking or cutting of flowers.

But secondly, because reverence for life was, in this way, an absolute, every falling short of it was provisional only, something that we would be restlessly trying to grow up and away from. He stresses the sorrow in our relations to other life, just because it’s this sorrow that will urge us on to “be a redeemer”, of ourselves and of nature more generally. But he also does speak with especial warmth about the shared delight in other lives which is the counterpart of the compassion with which we must share their pains – as with that insect helped from the water: “when it cleans its wings, you know you have experienced something wonderful: the happiness of having saved life.”  Indeed these sermons at St Nicolai must have been astonishing and moving events. Soon afterwards, Schweitzer gave some lectures in other countries on his ethic of ‘reverence for life’. In one such lecture, he later recalled, “I was so moved that I found it difficult to speak.”

That lecture tour included Oxford University (which later awarded Schweitzer an honorary degree): he gave the Dale lectures at Mansfield College in Hilary Term of 1922. At that time, memorials like the one in Siegfried Sassoon’s poem were going up in college chapels, churches, and other places throughout the city. In Schweitzer’s audiences there must have been many former soldiers, and many who had lost family, friends and colleagues in the War. It may be that some of these listeners didn’t like to hear this man with his German accent setting them right about the failed ethic which had allowed European civilization to fall into world war, or advising them about the suffering of insects. Nor, of course, can it now be said that we ever have cured ourselves of the habit of making wars. But as, yet again, the occasion comes round for communally recalling what these wars have cost, so again it’s exactly the right time to recall Schweitzer’s beautiful and saving ethic, and especially the rightly famous formulation of it, “Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.”

 

Notes and references:

There will be a service of remembrance at the Animals in War memorial, in Park Lane, London, on Sunday 12 November, starting at 3 p.m. The memorial and its implications have been discussed in this blog at https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2016/11/06/for-not-quite-all-of-the-fallen/

The numbers of animals used at Porton Down, and the explanation from the Ministry of Defence, is quoted on the Forces Network web-site at http://www.forces.net/news/tri-service/mod-criticised-over-disturbing-animal-experiments The quoted official account of Porton Down is at https://www.gov.uk/government/news/the-truth-about-porton-down

Bitte der armen Thiere, by Christian Adam Dann, was published in Tübingen in 1822.

A translation of Schweitzer’s sermons of 1919 is published by Macmillan as A Place for Revelation (1988). Quotations are from that edition, and mostly from the first three sermons, the finest of them. In a few cases I have altered the translation. Schweitzer’s account of Günsbach after the war comes from My Life and Thought, Allen and Unwin, 1933, (pp.210-11), as also does his recollection of his lecture tour. The phrases “ghastly drama” and “activist ethics” come from The Philosophy of Civilization, Prometheus Books, 1987, pp.312 and 315. The last quotation is referenced in Jon Wynne-Tyson’s The Extended Circle to The Philosophy of Civilization; I haven’t found it there, and only know it from Wynne-Tyson’s anthology.

Douglas Culham’s 1917 painting is titled Mud Road to Passchendaele, and is in the collection of the Canadian War Museum. The reproduction is in the public domain.