Vivisection’s Human Benefit Irrelevant

In their commentaries on vivisection (May 24), Ava Park and Robert Phalen radically differ about the validity of animal research but are alike in assuming that the test (of vivisection’s worth) is whether or not it benefits humans.

From an ethical point of view, however, the test of vivisection is the harm it does its victims, whether or not it benefits humans. For Phalen, this raises the specter of animal rights and the threat of erasing the differences between us and non-human species that supposedly justify our hunting them for their hides or heads, slaughtering them for their flesh, trapping them for their pelts and experimenting on their bodies for our benefit.

Animals, to be sure, are different from us in some respects; but then we humans are different from one another in some respects too. What matters ethically is whether a given difference is relevant. However different they may be in other respects, all who do the same work deserve to be paid the same. Similarly, other differences aside, all who bleed alike, and ache and feel anguish alike, deserve to be treated alike in respect to experimentation. Hence, either we humans should forfeit our rights and join animals in the labs or the animals should share our rights and join us in the free world.

If the choice were simply between human and animal suffering, few of us would find a decision easy to come by. But animal research is by no means always or even mostly the heroic struggle against disease that Phalen makes it out to be. Every year millions of helpless laboratory animals, whose crime is merely their failure to be members of the human race, are caged, pinioned, irradiated, shocked, poisoned, gassed, surgically maimed and ultimately killed and discarded for purposes that have nothing to do with saving human lives or reducing human suffering.

Clearly, as Ava Park says, we must abandon the institutionalized business-as-usual approach and make every effort to capitalize on non-animal research procedures, including in-vitro testing (the use of cell, tissue and organ cultures), clinical and epidemiological studies and computer modeling.

Our science, our health, our humanity, and most certainly our fellow creatures, will be the better for it.

JAMES L. CALDERWOOD, Laguna Beach