Summing Up

The post previous to this one reviewed seven years of annual research statistics as reported in this blog. The conclusion was that very little had changed during the period, except in the type of publicity given to the numbers. In between those reports, of course, many other aspects of animal research have been featured here, and it may be that, given the lack of change or at least lack of progress, this more or less fortnightly commentary must have said, in seven years, just about all that it usefully can say, for now, about this unhappy subject. At any rate, I have looked back at the 180 or so posts, and picked out some of their main preoccupations. (The references in this post can be followed up using the ‘search’ button near the top right of any page of the blog, but anyway a list of links is given in the notes at the end. All the quotations are ones that have featured in this blog.)

One thing that has not been attempted in any of the posts is to argue that animal research cannot produce usable knowledge. It’s an argument that only a trained scientist can manage, and even then I would say it’s doomed to fail. Much more important, it’s the wrong argument; it implies that animal research that does or might produce usable knowledge is justified. The dispute then becomes a technical one, as to which research, with what costs in animal suffering, can be accepted: exactly the dispute which is presently institutionalized in UK law. The premise of this blog has been in line with what the pioneering anti-vivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe said – that, where vivisection is the cost, then “the elixir vitae itself would be too dearly purchased.”

But to concede that animal research can yield useful information doesn’t mean accepting what its proponents assert: i.e. that it commonly does so, or indeed wouldn’t be allowed to proceed if it did not. Anyone who reads published research of this kind, will know how tenuous a claim to new knowledge will justify publication, and how curt and speculative a connection to human health may be offered as a claim to relevance (see, for instance, the post titled ‘The Science of Handing on Misery’). Much of the research proves anyway to be un-reproducible, so that both that research and its failed follow-ups are mere waste of time and life: this is the so-called ‘reproducibility crisis’. Much of it doesn’t even make that much progress; it comes to nothing, and is not published.

Yet the research themes themselves seem to rise above these weaknesses. They have their own ontogeny or rule of growth, forming careers, departments, journals, huge bibliographies – a whole sociology of activity, self-sufficient and pretty well proof against question. In one post (‘Counting the Cost Again’), we can see this process at a relatively early stage in the case of toxicology, an especially unpleasant area of animal research. Elsewhere, a quotation taken from a science journal (one that in general supports such research) illustrates that sort of growth in the sub-area of ecotoxicology, the study of poisons active in the environment:

Did we need 250 papers to tell us that ethinylstradiol [a common oestrogen medication] poses a risk to fish? Everything we need to know to protect the environment was communicated in the first half a dozen papers.

The next 244 papers, then, were simply needless, useful only to the professionals and their institutions, perhaps also to journals, certainly also to makers of research equipment.

That category of research, using animals to learn about their own species, is on the face of it the most scientifically sound variety of vivisection. It often appears in the annual statistics under the heading ‘animal welfare’, and certainly learning how not to poison fish may contribute something to their welfare. But in general that heading, much-liked by those who defend animal research (it’s for their sake too!), is a wretched misnomer. The work so-named is really just another variety of the back-room research which sustains and advances every systematic misuse of animals. The post titled ‘The Horse Misused’ shows it in the case of horse-racing. Even animal research itself has a thriving research penumbra, trying out different husbandry conditions (“there’s a hard science behind enrichment”), or different strains or species of animal.

But worst of all, the laboratory has for decades been making possible and profitable the mass-processing of farmed animals: enhancing their fertility and birth-numbers (“Do you know the productive potential of the sows on your farm?”), arming them against the diseases that their over-crowding would naturally incubate, fattening them efficiently (“the maximum amount of flesh in the shortest possible time”), and refining the techniques of their slaughter. Not just traditional farm-animals like pigs and chickens are being propelled through this “animal sciences innovation pipeline” (the Roslin Institute’s elegant phraseology); ostriches, fish and mink are in it too, and insects are on the way. Such research, animals for animals, may be sound in principle, but in every other way it’s pernicious. The post from which the Roslin quotation comes (‘Pimping for Farmers’) makes a fair introduction to this area of animal abuse, but many other posts in this blog, gathered in the category ‘Farming connections’, show it at its misdirected and repulsive work.

There would have been a category ‘Public relations’ if I had foreseen, when making the list in 2015, how assertive a part of the animal research scene that would become. The promotional organisation Understanding Animal Research was formerly called the Research Defence Society, and it did indeed see itself in those earlier days as defending the practice against its critics. How old-fashioned that now seems! These days, the UAR and its keen disciples in every animal research institution see themselves as celebrating the use of animals in science – or rather, not the use but the collaboration of animals (they’re “team members”).

Especially at Christmas time, when the annual awards ceremony for the Concordat on Openness happens, this blog has marvelled at the way the PR push has transformed the public character of animal research, without in any way modifying the reality of it, or wishing to. In fact, as we’ve noticed in Oxford University’s own web-site, the publicity has been largely handed over to PR professionals who have little knowledge of the reality and can’t speak with accuracy about it. Yet with their continuous output of promotional material and staging of public events they have been able (in PR terminology) to ‘own the story’ on behalf of the practitioners.

This PR has been, on its own terms, a conspicuous success, although opinion surveys have yet to show a measurable change in public attitudes. But of course the profession does not really ‘own’ the story, certainly not in law. On the contrary, the main point of the 1876 and 1985 vivisection acts (apart from giving researchers special protection from other animal cruelty laws) was to give power over it, or at least over its ethics, to the laity, acting through their elected representatives, notably the Home Secretary. Or rather, give that power back, since the ethics never should have been the province of the vivisectors. Science is not itself a whole way of life or separate culture with its own independent set of values, though this is sometimes implied in allusions to the ‘two cultures’ (i.e. science and humanities). As Iris Murdoch has said, “There is only one culture, of which science, so interesting and so dangerous, is now an important part.” This plain assertion, made by a novelist and philosopher, itself illustrates the point. Scientists may decide, as professionals, what can be learned through science and how to learn it, but not whether it should be learned in that way or at all, or what to do with the results. Those are decisions made within the whole culture, or should be.

For an example, the post ‘Life on Mars’ references a story titled ‘Homo Floresiensis’ in which two scientists decide not to publish their discovery of a hitherto unknown hominid people: “maybe,” says one of them, “it’s the undiscoverers we should be proud of [my italics].” That possibility (it’s only a ‘maybe’) revises our notion of what a scientist might be like; it changes, in however modest a way, the moral context in which real scientists work. So it illustrates what Iris Murdoch goes on to say: “We are men [sic] and we are moral agents before we are scientists, and the place of science in human life must be discussed in words [her italics].” ‘Homo Floriensis’ has special appeal in that post’s context of space travel, with its history of cruelty to animals and its likely future of bringing human vandalism and predation to other parts of the universe. But it’s just one tiny instance in a great centuries-long moral discussion about our relations with other species – a discussion which has, in fact, gone beyond words into art and even music (see ‘Made Wise by More than Pity’, about Wagner’s opera Parsifal).

I have tried to make this a strong point in the blog, that there has been so much of this discussion, so many powerful contributions to it in literature, art, and philosophy: specifically that these texts and images have formed a massed consensus against the long history of our disrespect for animals. The magnificent anthology made by Jon Wynne-Tyson and titled The Extended Circle, which has often been mentioned in the blog, makes this clear enough. I don’t know whether it’s right to say, as the historian of vivisection John Vyvyan does, that “virtually all the great creative artists, in whatever medium they worked, have condemned the cruelty of science”, but certainly those artists have made available all the ideas and values that inform such a condemnation. William Hogarth, Charles Dickens, Patricia Highsmith, Henry Moore, William Trevor, Georges Rouault, Franz Kafka, James Ensor, and many other writers and artists have been drawn upon in this blog.

As for arts that show it favourably: all I ever found was an early nineteenth-century painting, admittedly rather a good painting, though ambiguous as to meaning (Emile-Edouard Mouchy’s La Lecon de physiologie sur un chien), and a teenage fiction titled The Pig-Heart Boy. (There are posts about each of these.) I don’t find this unbalance hard to understand. The prime justification for animal research is expediency, seconded by a host of equally unappealing motives, including fear, tradition, careerism, dreams of immortality, money, and cruelty. (I’d say that this last has been rare as an actual motive, but present much less rarely as an adjunct or occupational consequence. You may recall what C.S.Lewis says about one of his fictional vivisectors: “years of doing cruel experiments on animals had made him hate and fear them.”) These are all human enough urges, but their exploration in serious art, while it may sometimes explain and even raise pity for them, can do nothing to make them admired. It’s notable that even H.G.Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle, both of them trained scientists who publicly approved vivisection, have subverted it in their fictions.

Something has been said in the blog about the level of general culture which seems to characterize the laboratory scene (see the post ‘Remembering Dolly the Sheep’). The shallowness of that culture, and its inadequacy to the moral decisions which it has been taking on our behalf, is most glaringly shown up in its crude and partisan appreciation of Darwinian evolution. Biological science’s greatest revelation, the revelation which effectively gave science its victory over Christianity as the dominant interpretation of life on earth, has done even less for the animals whose relations it showed us to be than Christianity, which made them our servants, had done. Science, knowing them to be our kin, has persisted in treating them as our slaves.

That awkward mismatch, the enslaving of our acknowledged kin, no doubt explains the habit of euphemism which is so much a part of animal-research communications, and is much discussed in this blog. It also at least partly explains, I would say, the facetious tone in which animals are habitually spoken of by scientists and the journalists who write about science. There are the joky names: ‘Dolly’, ‘Hamlet’ (for a pig), ‘Quickzee’ (for a horse embryo). There are the habitual puns: ‘Dinnersaurus Rex’ for a giant model of a chicken at Oxford University (you heard), “a giant leap for lambkind”, thought amusing in reference to the toy sheep on the latest moon rocket. There’s a stock of patronizing clichés (“the humble lab mouse”). All of these help to distance and belittle the animals. The term ‘animal-lover’, I have argued (see the post ‘Love Talk’), has just the same purpose or at least the same effect, situating the value in the human rather than the animal. In the chapter of his book King Solomon’s Ring titled ‘Laughing at Animals’, the great ethologist Konrad Lorenz spoke of “deriding things which, to me, are holy”. Keeping that ‘holiness’ out of animals is what all those quips and disparagements are really for, deliberately or not. We humans have it as our special birthright, of course: hence that phrase ‘the sanctity of human life’.

Darwin showed as an evidenced fact that there could be no reason for making an exception of humans in that way. But there are and have always been other ways to come at the same truth. For Gandhi, it was the Hindu practice of ‘cow protection’ that taught man “his identity with all that lives”. For Lord Dowding it was spiritual experience that showed “all life is one.” And then there’s the power of the sympathetic imagination, acting in art and literature, to find this truth: Coleridge’s ancient mariner feeling “love and reverence to all things”, the “amity” that bridges the mutual incomprehension between a woman and a caged cockatoo, J.M.Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello urging her academic audience to recognize their kinship with other animals: “open your heart and listen to what your heart says.” And she founds this appeal not on sentiment but on fact: that sort of sympathy is necessarily felt for “any being with whom I share the substrate of life” (notice the ‘whom’).

This is indeed the one sufficient basis for animal rights, and for all other sorts of right: a share in the substrate of life and in its essential dynamic, the urge to continue enjoying that share. The novelist Brigid Brophy called it “the right to stay alive”. In T.H.White’s The Book of Merlin, King Arthur contemplates the whole conspectus of animal life and concludes likewise “that, indeed, the mere fact of being was the ultimate right.” This takes us well beyond sentience, important as that property is in ethics (and in animal politics for the moment). Albert Schweitzer spoke of “life as such”, and saw its claims on our respect in insects, plants, and crystals. For him, a dead beetle was a lesson in fellowship. The great philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer believed that all nature, including waters and rocks, participated as we do in the will to go on existing. And the more modern philosophy called Panpsychism finds the elements of consciousness in the merest elements of matter (see ‘From electrons to Humans: a Mindful Planet’).

How can we live, if not quite undestructively then at least honourably, in such china-shop conditions? By wanting to: that was Albert Schweitzer’s answer. So one purpose in viewing all the pain, cruelty, arrogance, and stupidity which has passed before us in this blog, as well as their opposite in decency, love, and idealism, is that it reminds us to want to. That’s the root of what’s called virtue ethics, discussed in the post ‘He that has Humanity’: wanting, and therefore trying, to become the sort of person and the sort of species that we might be able to think well of. A hard project, and in the case of the species almost certainly impossible of success, so that our best hope may be that this wrong turn in evolution and scourge of the planet, our own species, will somehow pass from it, to the infinite benefit of all the other life on earth.

This blog will now take an undefined break. Thank you for reading it. I hope that both it and the VERO web-site will continue to provide useful information and ideas for a while as they stand.

Notes and references:

The life and work of Frances Power Cobbe is featured in the blog here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/in-defence-of-frances-power-cobbe/

‘The Science of Handing on Misery’, an example of animal research with claimed but meretricious connection to human (mental) health, as also of the sort of journalism which is always available to glamorize such research, is here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2019/09/13/the-science-of-handing-on-misery/. The title of the post, incidentally, is a quotation from Philip Larkin’s famous poem ‘This Be the Verse’.

Toxicology is discussed here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2020/08/08/counting-the-cost-again-the-2019-numbers/ 

and ecotoxicology (in a subsection titled ‘Defective research’) here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2020/02/28/some-science-stories-and-their-animals/

The post titled ‘The Horse Misused’, dealing with the slaughter of unwanted race horses and also the very unpleasant research career of ‘Twink’ Allen, is here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2021/08/17/the-horse-misused/.  An example of the background research that services mainstream animal research is featured here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2018/03/15/fun-on-the-farm/

The revolting world of farm-animal research is shown in this post: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2020/09/08/pimping-for-farmers/.   See also a post talking especially about the work of Temple Grandin in fitting animals to be killed: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2018/07/07/fitting-them-for-slaughter-the-work-of-temple-grandin-and-others/

The quotation casting lab animals as “team members” actually comes from an article in the (American) Institute for Laboratory Animal Research; it’s used in all seriousness there to indicate the common attitudes of researchers in the USA, but equivalent expressions (e.g. “they help us to study diseases”) are frequently to be encountered in UK publicity. See this post about memorial tributes to dead lab animals:  https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2018/02/28/remembrance-and-refuse/

The animal research pages of Oxford University’s web-site, their ‘collagist’ manner of composition and their unreliability, are reviewed here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2018/10/31/on-the-trail-of-an-untruth-the-sequel/

Iris Murdoch’s “one culture” (by which she meant the whole history of human thought, art, and communications), and by contrast the frivolousness of much of what scientists are reported as saying on matters beyond their specialisms, are discussed here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2016/08/29/remembering-dolly-the-sheep/

The post ‘Life on Mars’ is here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2017/03/13/life-on-mars/ and there’s more about animals in space exploration in this post: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/to-boldly-make-them-go/

Jon Wynne-Tyson’s anthology, a “protest rally on paper”, is reviewed here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2020/04/24/the-book-of-the-rally/ 

John Vyvyan wrote two impassioned histories of vivisection, taking it from early days up to the 1970s. He also wrote a book about the play Hamlet, which very well illustrates the Iris Murdoch point about literary culture. All three books are discussed in this post: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2017/10/23/two-histories-of-vivisection-and-an-essay-on-hamlet/

The painting by Mouchy is shown and discussed here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2018/10/16/the-romance-of-vivisection/.  The Pig-Heart Boy, and the recent operation of that sort at the University of Maryland, are discussed in this post: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2022/01/21/hearts-and-minds/.

Konrad Lorenz is spoken about in several of the posts, but the one quoted is this: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/experimenting-with-mother/.  Gandhi is quoted on ‘cow protection’ here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2018/10/02/two-anniversaries-one-lesson/  and Hugh Dowding here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2018/04/25/dowding-and-the-animals/

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Ancient Mariner is discussed in this post: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2016/07/12/shedding-the-albatross/.  The poem about the cockatoo, a very fine poem, is discussed here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2016/04/09/setting-tests-or-learning-lessons/  and J.M.Coetzee’s fiction about Elizabeth Costello, originally published as The Lives as Animals, is featured here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2019/06/20/apes-and-academics/

Brigid Brophy is quoted here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2020/07/23/impulse-to-break-open-cages-the-life-and-works-of-brigid-brophy/  and The Book of Merlin here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2018/01/01/two-merlins-and-their-tasks/. Albert Schweitzer is often mentioned in the blog, but is mainly featured here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2017/11/06/albert-schweitzer-in-time-of-war/

The post ‘He that has Humanity’, reviewing a book that attacks vivisection from the point of view of virtue ethics, is here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2019/08/11/he-that-has-humanity/. As to the likely or desirable future of the human species, see https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/whose-world-and-how-well-leave-it/

The illustrations show (a) a banner at the National Animal Rights March in 2021, (b) a still from the 2019 film Space Dogs, and (c) a woodcut from The Animals’ Vegan Manifesto by Sue Coe, picturing the escape of a cow from men and their city. All three topics are covered elsewhere in this blog.