Soliciting Solicitude

An Audience of One
Aug 8, 2017 · 3 min read

“With great power comes great responsibility.”

This overused quote nevertheless holds true for topics ranging from gun control to human rights. People on either end of these debates often cannot empathize with the other side. Animal rights inspire such dispute. Some people feel strongly that animals should not be used as surrogates for humans in testing, while others feel that the march of progress is the only thing that matters. These feelings are not mutually exclusive. The American Anti-Vivisection Society (AAVS) is one of the groups leading the charge on behalf of the animals, to place them on the same level of moral standing as humans. The fall 2009 issue of their magazine featured an article by the Reverend Professor Andrew Linzey, Ph.D., DD, titled “Why Animals Deserve Special Moral Solicitude.” Like the background of its author, the article shows how morality and science can intersect for the greatest good.

Humans have lived alongside their fellow creatures for thousands of years, and many of those creatures have thrived because of the changes that humanity has wrought, while others perished. In the beginning, humans were little more than tribal monkeys who roamed the land and eventually became the first nomads, hunting and gathering. Before long they started cooperating to take down wooly mammoths and build the first cities. Early humans domesticated camels, horses, and sheep not because they may have pleased their masters, but because these animals served purposes besides eating. Fast forward to today where humans live in massive cities where the only relationship they might have with an animal is when cockroaches invade an apartment, or a dog provides companionship.

The American Anti-Vivisection Society published a magazine in Fall 2009 with a cover bearing the headline, “Ethics and Animals: Vision for a New World.” A quick Google search defines vivisection as the “practice of performing operations on live animals for the purpose of experimentation or scientific research,” but also comments that the only people who call it that are those who are opposed to such work. Unsurprisingly, many of the articles contained therein display at least a moderate opposition to the practice. One of these is titled “Why Animals Deserve Special Moral Solicitude,” by the aforementioned Rev. Linzey. The question at the core of the debate: Do the results of using animals for research justify doing so?

Anti-vivisectionists and other pro-animal rights groups are quick to point out that research has shown that some animals are capable of feeling (at the minimum): pain, shock, terror, anticipation, foreboding, stress, anxiety and trauma. In addition, animals are unable to provide consent or represent their cause in a court of law, unlike humans who have ample protections from such abuse. Anti-vivisectionists say the animals have done nothing wrong because they (arguably) lack the imagination that humans so often cite as evidence of their specialness. But the only difference between a termite mound and a skyscraper is the brainpower of the organism taking stock of its creation.

Another banner idea of the anti-vivisectionists is that proper scientists would never subject their fellow humans to the conditions suffered in a laboratory: repeated experimentation, forced breeding, isolation and eventual euthanasia. Researchers cling to the idea that their patients give consent and sign paperwork. But the anti-vivisectionists are not referring to those conditions for medical research. Vivisection is purposefully used as a term that summons up images of white-coated surgeons slicing open a living organism. The analogy they want to draw is from animal testing in all its forms to the abhorrent lobotomies performed on patients in decades past, when consent was not compulsory for treatment.

The American Anti-Vivisection Society does great work and uses their magazine to exhibit the powerful arguments made both for and against animal testing. However, the term “vivisection” immediately puts neutral readers on the defensive; an entire magazine about why society should be against it is downright intimidating. “Why Animals Deserve Special Moral Solicitude” is a reasonable article which uses poignant examples to show why animals should not be used for research, while admitting the potential for that same research to help people. When animals are finally granted the equivalent considerations in scientific examination as (human) guinea pigs, then hopefully such horrid terms as “vivisection” can be dropped from common use altogether.

An Audience of One

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An audience of one person is more than enough.

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