The Book of the Rally

Today is World Day for Animals in Laboratories, an occasion for calling attention to these more or less invisible animals, for reviewing their experiences during the year, and for judging what has been done and what still is to be done for their deliverance. And heaven knows there is plenty in that last category, what there still is to be done. A few weeks ago the European Union published a report on animal research in member-states for the period 2015-17. It shows that approximately 9.5 million animals were used in each of those years (the UK leading the field), and that even more of them – over 12 million in 2017 – were bred for laboratories but died unused. The 12 million or so included not just mice, whose squandering is a familiar phenomenon, but also dogs, cats, goats, pigs, horses, and monkeys.

The more detailed state-by-state numbers appear in a part of the report called the Staff Working Document, a giant cascade of statistics which would be hard to make sense of even if the online version was in working order, which it wasn’t when I attempted it. Of course it’s much better than secrecy, but these accumulations of numbers are strangely barren of meaning. Really they’re the opposite of a dramatization: millions of particular unpleasant events, in times and places across Europe and across the three years, transformed into static numbers.

World Day, by contrast, was founded in 1979 exactly to dramatize, to make repeatedly visible and audible, public concern about the plight of these animals and about the wrong of using them in this way at all. If you’re present at these occasions, or if you look at the photographs, there is one especially moving thing about them. As against what Gerald Carson (in Men, Beasts, and Gods: a History of Cruelty and Kindness to Animals, 1972) calls the “fearful and self-regarding thoughts” with which medical science has hoped over the years to persuade us to accept vivisection – fear of cancer, fear of war, fear of Covid-19 – here is ocular proof of something more honourable and self-forgetful in humans. Patrick Corbett described it, in Animals, Men and Morals (I shall explain why all these quotations later), as “that model of a disinterested [i.e. unselfish], loving and respectful life which we all carry with us in our hearts.”

Certainly there are many necessary and often courageous campaigns and demonstrations every year through the world. As part of an exhibition about dissent shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2014 (it was titled Disobedient Objects) there was an illuminated map showing the multiplying of them year by year, and very inspiring it was. But all of them had a human political or social interest; most sought justice for people some or all of whom were among those present to demand it for themselves. Animals must depend on others to do it for them, so that as Peter Singer has said, “Animal liberation will require greater altruism on the part of human beings than any other liberation movement.” World Day shows that such altruism is indeed available, and exemplifies it for all who look. In that way, it evokes the future with a kind of implicit promise: this version of humanity will be possible.

Then World Day has also a consolatory function which everyone who attends such events must feel. The publisher Jon Wynne-Tyson, an important personality in the revival of the animal rights movement that began in the 1970s, wrote that the “daily painful empathy with the predicament of all sentient life is not an easy burden to bear.” He saw this too as promise for the future, in that it was the motive in humanity which might drive our evolution towards a species-life in some sort of harmony with the rest of the world. But meanwhile it remains a burden, especially for those not professionally engaged in animal rights work, therefore not able to convert the distress into daily action: and such are the majority of us. Therefore, to be with a band of like-minded people from time to time is a very great consolation. In his essay on vivisection of 1893, the philosopher and social reformer Edward Carpenter contrasted life-science in its guise as mere curiosity (“lust of knowledge”) with the kind of science which teaches “that greatest and most health-giving of all knowledge – the sense of our common life and unity with all creatures.” With all non-human creatures certainly – it’s what animal rights events primarily affirm – but what about unity with our fellow-humans, from whom we may usually feel unhappily alienated? That alienation is what animal rights pioneer Henry Salt sardonically referenced when he called his 1921 autobiography Seventy Years among Savages. But World Day gatherings have that “health-giving” efficacy to rejoin us to our own species as we genuinely like it and as we want it to be.

But of course there can be no World Day rally this year. It was due to take place on Saturday in Liverpool, but the Covid-19 pandemic has made it impossible – ironically so, since the disease arises directly from human maltreatment of other animals (see the previous post on this subject). As the World Day facebook page says, “This does not mean we can’t all do something to mark World Lab animal week by taking part in some online campaigning.” In fact some political theorists writing in Monday’s Guardian claim to have identified nearly 100 distinct methods of non-violent action used or even invented during the period of the lock-down. Anyway, the very enterprising 2020 online version of World Day, with video speeches, can be watched on the facebook page, and a small selection of online actions which you can take at present for lab animals is linked below in the notes.

However, as an in-home substitute for the World Day gathering I would especially recommend the book from which I’ve taken all the quotations used above (except for the World Day facebook one): Jon Wynne-Tyson’s The Extended Circle: a Dictionary of Humane Thought (1985). This anthology is the literary equivalent of an animal rights protest rally, a diverse assemblage of like-minded and impassioned people speaking their minds on the subject. Carpenter himself, as a utopian visionary, is in there, of course, but so is his near-opposite, the sceptical churchman Dean Inge: “We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.” There are politicians, scientists, bishops, judges, actors, philosophers (of course), poets: over 500 of them in all. Some are famous names, though perhaps unfamiliar in this connection: Robert Browning, Alexander Pope, Victor Hugo (“I believe that pity is a law like justice, and that kindness is a duty like uprightness.”). Others will perhaps be discoveries. For me, re-sampling the book now, one such is the distinguished American anthropologist Loren Eiseley who, recalling “the eyes of every starved mongrel I have fed from Curacao to Cuernavaca”, realizes that his preoccupation with suffering animals has made him, too, “a wanderer forever in the streets of men”.

Some of the texts are substantial, the equivalents of speeches: such are the extracts, for instance, from George Bernard Shaw, Peter Singer, and Richard Ryder. Others are stray exclamations, something more like placards or banners: “The more I see of men, the more I like dogs” [Madame de Staël]; “I wish no living thing to suffer pain” [the poet Shelley]; “I think the rapidly growing tendency to regard animals as born for nothing except slavery to so-called humanity absolutely disgusting” [the publisher Victor Gollancz]; “The awful wrongs and sufferings forced upon the innocent, helpless, faithful animal race, form the blackest chapter in the whole world’s history” [Edward Freeman, Oxford’s Professor of Modern History 1884-92].

Across the centuries these men and women have spoken for the non-human animals with passion and eloquence. To be among this great enlightened host as a reader is very moving, a powerful and convincing experience. If you have a copy, spend some time with it again; if you haven’t, try to get hold of one. As I say, it’s a protest rally on paper, a permanent demonstration. It affirms that there has never been a day on which this voice of love and remonstrance was not somewhere being raised on behalf of maltreated animals, nor ever will be such a day, until humanity becomes either wise or extinct.

Notes and references:

The report submitted to the European Commission consists in three distinct documents. The two summarizing documents are linked here: https://ec.europa.eu/info/files/commission-adopts-detailed-reports-use-of-animals-in-science-in-EU_en  The Staff Working Document is published online here (it seems to be working properly now): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1581689520921&uri=CELEX:52020SC0010

The Guardian article is here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/20/the-global-pandemic-has-spawned-new-forms-of-activism-and-theyre-flourishing

Some current campaigns with petitions you might like to sign are accessible here https://www.peta.org/action/action-alerts/

and here https://www.change.org/p/we-are-against-animal-cruelty-close-the-laboratory-of-pharmacology-and-toxicology-in-hamburg-juliakloeckner-bgv-hh-9a9d8695-c13d-4a3b-9aa1-369e17817704

and here https://www.change.org/p/retire-dogs-cats-monkeys-from-u-s-government-labs-givethemback

The Extended Circle was first published in 1985 by Jon Wynne-Tyson’s own Centaur Press, but there have been other editions from other publishers since then.

Jon Wynne-Tyson was born in 1924; he died on 26 March of this year.

Which Crisis?

The health crisis caused by Covid-19 is unusual in its suddenness and universality, but there is nothing to learn from it about human health. We already knew that humans were liable to such infectious diseases; much of our medical research and development over the last two centuries has been devoted to identifying and disabling the bacteria and viruses that cause them. Research into Covid-19 will differ only in the haste and internationalism which correspond with the irruption of the disease. More important then, because this is something that we haven’t even started to put right, is that Covid-19 is also a crisis in our relations with other animals or, rather, a flagrant symptom of it.

The pathway taken by the virus, from bats to pangolins to humans, has now been more or less confidently identified, and the particular setting for it, the notorious wet markets of Wuhan, have been prohibited together with other such markets in China (see this blog on 28 February). But as the Mirror newspaper reports, “multiple species are still being crammed together, slaughtered and sold, in filthy conditions, contaminated with blood and faeces, at countless markets in other Asian countries.” Live-animals markets even exist in New York, selling less exotic animals perhaps, but with the same crowding, on-site slaughtering, and consequent morally and physically squalid conditions. (Two petitions which you may like to sign on this subject are linked in the notes below.)

But aren’t even conventional slaughterhouses “contaminated with blood and faeces”? At any rate, the more mainstream forms of agriculture are not innocent by-standers in the Covid-19 story. An excellent piece by Laura Spinney in the Guardian (‘Is Factory Farming to Blame for the Coronavirus?’) uncovers their part in creating the conditions for that and other such animal-derived infections. Not just have the huge factory farms pushed the small farmers of Asia out of their traditional lands and into ‘specialist’ wild animal trading, working in the forest and other uncultivated lands where the animals have hitherto been relatively undisturbed. Such farms also create, on their own account, ideal virus-incubating conditions: that is, a target host of unnaturally crowded and unhealthy animals, with none of the genetic variety that can inhibit transmission. These conditions, says Spinney, “can result in the ratcheting up of the virus’s virulence. If it then spills over into humans, we are potentially in trouble.”

Among the products of such agriculture have been campylobacter, Q fever, hepatitis E, and various mutations of the influenza virus. As to this last case, industrial agriculture’s “strategic alliance with influenza” has been fully documented in a recent book by the evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, whose title bluntly states the case: Big Farms Make Big Flu (Monthly Review Press, 2016).

The more general truth is that farms make diseases. Humans have been fashioning their illnesses out of animals, along with their food, clothes, motive power, amusement, and latterly lab equipment, for millennia. In his comprehensive history of medicine, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, Roy Porter has to begin (on page 18 of 700) with the agricultural revolution of the neolithic period, because this was where the trouble began. Newly crowded human populations (more humans could now be fed from a given area of land) were living off force-crowded animals, and so creating the right conditions for “pathogens once exclusive to animals” to jump across to humans:

Many of the worst human diseases were created by proximity to animals. Cattle provided the pathogen pool with tuberculosis and viral poxes like smallpox. Pigs and ducks gave humans their influenzas, while horses brought rhinoviruses and hence the common cold . . . water polluted with animal faeces also spreads polio, cholera, typhoid, viral hepatitis, whooping cough and diphtheria.  

Smallpox, to take one especially baneful example, was a “ratcheting up” in human hosts of the cowpox virus. Edward Jenner, the man who pioneered the use of cowpox as a prophylactic against it, understood well in the 18^th century the context which Porter describes. He stated it thus in his Enquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Cow Pox (1798):

The deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of diseases. From the love of splendour, from the indulgence of luxury, and from his fondness for amusement he has familiarized himself with a great number of animals, which may not originally have been intended for his associates.

As I said, we haven’t started to put this problem right, but of course there’s been plenty of remedial action. Laura Spinney mentions avian flu virus H7N9, first found in humans in 2013; a vaccine was developed against this virus in poultry once it became a serious threat to the economics of chicken farming. Now a similar approach – that is, curing the result and not the cause – is being used against African swine fever, a disease which is not yet known to affect humans but has been killing millions of pigs in China before their profitable time (though it appears to be relatively harmless in the wild animals from which it came). A vaccine against it has been devised which, we’re encouraged to believe by a veterinary epidemiologist (that title itself tells a wretched story), justifies “guarded optimism”, although “more testing of safety and efficacy is needed.” [Science, 20 March]

Yes of course, it always is, and here more than ever, when we see research patching up the pathologies which research largely made possible in the first place, one is reminded of that scientist for all seasons, Dr Grant Swinger, alert to every new fashion and opportunity in big science and to the funds which lubricate it (he was the brilliant invention of the late Daniel Greenberg). Still, we certainly find ourselves in urgent need of Dr Swinger and his fellow-professionals at present, so let’s see how they’re getting on with the scourge of Covid-19.

Animal-research laboratories are of course being affected by the pandemic like any other work-place, except that they can’t simply be closed or even put on reduced hours, because there’s a population of animals to keep alive or not. We’re told that labs in the USA are “currently grappling with the best way to care for the millions of mice, monkeys, and other research animals they care for across the country”. One way to do this, of course, is to put them down – ‘take care of them’ in that sense – and a report in Science’s online news for 23 March does indeed announce that “Labs are euthanizing thousands of mice in response to coronavirus pandemic.”

There is no doubt great reluctance to resort to such measures, and one researcher calls the loss “heartbreaking, scientifically and emotionally”. The distress is surely sincere, but it illustrates the ethical non-sense inherent in animal research. (You may recall a similar cry of distress from farmers who lost cattle in the UK’s foot and mouth outbreak earlier this century.) For by way of mitigating the offence, the director of animal resources at Johns Hopkins University explains that many of these mice “would have been euthanized anyway, because, for example, they weren’t born with the genetic profile the lab needed for particular experiments.” It’s just a case of hurrying things up, of doing “two to three weeks’ worth of culling in the course of a single week”. The director himself is “assisting with much of the culling”. This is a reminder of something which the word “heartbreaking” tends to obscure, that killing animals, whether un-needed or at the end of their living usefulness, is a daily routine in laboratories. “Our top priority is animal welfare”, says another lab director, reporting on this crisis. It’s a very familiar claim, but it’s a pious untruth. A laboratory in which it was true would have to find homes for its animals and then close down.

Fortunately the great supplier to the world of GM mice, the Jackson Laboratory – familiarly ‘Jax’ – at Maine and elsewhere (see this blog on 3 July 2017) is not suffering similar heartbreak. Not only has it “not increased its culling” (the routine toll in the Jax labs must constitute a daily massacre), but the demand for ‘mouse models’ susceptible to Covid-19 has prompted “the Jax team” to undertake “a large-scale in vitro fertilization (IVF) program”, so that “very shortly, there’ll be thousands of these mice available to the scientific community.” Meanwhile, all other specialized mice are fully available. Incidentally, for anxious researchers who may be asking themselves “Can humanized mice (immunodeficient mice engrafted with human CD34+ hematopoietic stem cells) be infected with Coronavirus?”, the Jax FAQs section has a reassuring answer: “the chances . . . is [sic] extremely remote.” Well, that’s always been regarded as safe enough odds in the past.

There has been some suggestion that the present urgency may actually have benefited animals, by allowing researchers to conduct clinical trials of possible vaccines straight after in vitro studies, without the usual animal testing. The safety and effectiveness of this way of doing things will thereby have been clearly established. But is this really happening? As far as I can tell, it has applied only to the ‘repurposing’ of therapies already tested and approved in the conventional way for other conditions: for instance, as the journal Science reports, “drugs that have performed well in animal studies against the other two deadly coronaviruses, which cause SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)”. But in whatever way it’s being managed (and the Jax announcement shows that animals are certainly implicated in large numbers), a lot of hard and hurried work is being done to find a vaccine for Covid-19.

To find a vaccine, but to leave the root cause untouched. And this short-termism is reflected in the imagery which is commonly being used to describe our present plight. “Nous sommes en guerre” said President Macron several times in his eloquent and moving address to the French nation on 16 March. Other politicians have used the same imagery in sundry variations. Scientists too. The editor of Science calls for a grand collective effort on the pattern of the Manhattan Project (which produced the first atom bomb). Sir Paul Nurse, director of the Francis Crick Institute in London, recently likened the co-operative endeavour for the nation’s health to the miscellany of ships which rescued the British army from Dunkirk.

All this is understandable, affecting, apt in its way. But it’s the wrong way, not so much because, as was recently argued in the Atlantic, you don’t win wars by skulking at home as we’re required to do at present, but because the attitude itself is mistaken. If there is an enemy in this case, it is we ourselves in our character as compulsive predators. A virus is no more an enemy than a tiger or a bear is an enemy, though all three can seriously harm us in some circumstances. Certain varieties of virus serve us well, for instance the ‘phages’ which can be used to disable some bacteria; others pursue their life-course (or life-like course, since viruses aren’t a self-sufficient life-form) in ways that are indeed capable, by chance, of killing us. The trick is to keep those, and their natural hosts, at a proper distance.

The situation is well understood in one of the earliest of all myths, the quest of the Babylonian King Gilgamesh to destroy the monster Humbaba in the far-distant Cedar Forest. Humbaba, with his “terrifying roar”, is spoken of and feared by the people as a monster, but he seems to do no pro-active harm at all. Simply being feared from a distance is his job. One translator of the epic, Stephen Mitchell, says “Humbaba has his appointed place in the divine order of things. He has specifically been commissioned to be monstrous by one of the great gods, because humans are not supposed to penetrate into the Cedar Forest and chop down its trees.” Or as Mitchell has Humbaba himself say, “I am the forest’s guardian. Enlil / Put me here to terrify men.” [pp.125, 31] It might be Covid-19 talking.

In so far as Gilgamesh gets wisdom from the disaster which his killing of Humbaba turns out to entail, it consists in returning to his own city, to his own proper sphere of life, and staying there. Something of this ancient lesson we may be able to learn from the present crisis, provided we see what sort of crisis it is: a health crisis just for the moment, but more importantly a long-term moral crisis habitually injuring us in ways like this until we at last put it (that is, put ourselves) right.

Notes and references:

Petitions against the live-animal markets of New York and elsewhere can be signed here: https://support.peta.org/page/17791/action/1?utm_source=PETA::E-Mail&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=0320::veg::PETA::E-Mail::PE%20URGENT%20Help%20Shut%20Down%20Live-Animal%20Markets%20WHO::::pads  and  https://support.peta.org/page/17888/action/1

The Mirror article, published on 26 March, can be read here: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/coronavirus-wet-markets-still-selling-21762902

The Guardian article, published on 28 March) is here: chttps://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/spotlight/is-factory-farming-to-blame-for-coronavirus/ar-BB11Qjbo?li=BBoPWjQ&ocid=mailsignout

Quotation on the agricultural revolution is from p.18 of Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: a Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present, HarperCollins, 1997. Porter’s quotation from Jenner’s book is on p.19.

The Science news story about African swine fever is on p.1285, 20 March (vol.367). The online news about culling populations of lab mice can be read here: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/it-s-heartbreaking-labs-are-euthanizing-thousands-mice-response-coronavirus-pandemic. The quotation about re-purposing drugs is from an article about Covid-19 research in the issue for 27 March, ‘Race to find Covid-19 treatments accelerates’, at p.1412. This also is the issue in which the editor makes the comparison with the Manhattan Project.

Announcements about Covid-19 by the Jackson Laboratory are on their web-site at https://www.jax.org/jax-mice-and-services/corona-virus-risk-mitigation. You will notice there Jax’s own plentiful use of the ‘top priority’ trope, an interesting study in itself.

The translation of Gilgamesh by Stephen Mitchell is published by Profile Books, 2004. Quotations are from pp.31 and 125.

The print by Sue Coe was issued in 2007, so that in addition to its strength as activist art it illustrates the perennial nature of the harms we inherit by intruding improperly into the lives of other species. The dead animals notice is from a photograph taken by Brian Gunn of the International Association Against Painful Experiments on Animals.