Science, animal rights, and the polemics of `clear thinking'

The struggle over the validity of a concept of ‘animal rights’ has traditionally been fought by a few men and women of impassioned conviction. In recent years, however, members of the larger public have been increasingly pulled into the debate and challenged to vote with their ballots and with their money. Judging by the popularity of such stores as The Body Shop (which sells cosmetics’that have not been tested on animals), the dramatic rise in membership of such organizations as PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), and the range of successful drives to pass legislation limiting the uses of animals in experimental settings, the men and women of conviction are beginning to get their case across. In one recent poll in the USA sponsored by Parent Magazine, the overwhelming majority of respondents felt that animals had some ‘rights’ that forbade humans doing with them whatever they pleased.’ While most US surveys suggest that a majority of the public still favours the use of animals in medical research, there is no longer clear support for the use of animals in ‘pure’ research without clear social benefit, or in ‘trivial’ research with perhaps a profit motive (such as cosmetics research). In Britain, sentiment is, if anything, even more disapproving. A Gallup poll sponsored by the Daily Telegraph found that one in two respondents felt that animal experimentation should be banned or further restricted. Among younger people (16-24 years), the proportion was 70%.2 Visceral propaganda strategies such as pictures of doe-eyed seal cubs destined for slaughter by clubbing, and of squirming monkeys trapped in experimental devices, have surely played a role in these changes in sentiment; but it would be misleading to see the movement for ‘animal rights’ merely as a chapter in the sociology of sentimentality. Recent general-interest articles across a wide spectrum of sources have also begun to debate the more formal ethical and philosophical principles of the animal rights movement. As a result, more and more people today are familiar with the concept of ‘speciesism’, an idea at the heart of the animal rights movement that took its present form in the work of Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher living in the United States. In 1976 Singer published a book, Animal Liberation, that quickly became a canonical text for animal rightists. In this book, Singer claimed that placing