Animals or Humans?

Let us assert a proposition that is, in the current context, rather heretical: To save the life of the lowliest child fated to live in the meanest circumstances in the most backward village in the furthest reaches of Bangladesh, we would countenance--regretfully, perhaps even tearfully--the death of any animal from hamster to great whale.

Scant years ago, a person who believed otherwise would have been thought callous or, perhaps, unbalanced. But fashionable ideas, like fashionable clothes, defy rational analysis. Take, for example, the case of the animal-rights movement. Its handful of hot-eyed adherents currently are subjecting the nation’s medical research institutions to their annual week of harassment and, in some cases, physical intimidation. Their purpose is to force a halt to the use of animals in medical research.

No living thing ought to be misused or mistreated. However, the twisting of this humane and inarguable admonition into a prohibition on the use of animals in legitimate medical research is absurd reductionism. It dulls moral reasoning into an instrument incapable of making mature distinctions.

Modern medicine is one of our civilization’s great engines of practical liberation. Pain and disease are forms of oppression. Millions of our fellow human beings have been freed of their burden by medical research. The arrogant cant of unthinking zealots must not obstruct this selfless enterprise.