The right to be treated with respect rests, rather, on a creature's being a "subject of a life," with certain experiences, preferences, and interests. "Speciesism" is as arbitrarily unjust as racism or sexism. Like the racist who holds that respect for other races does not count as much as respect for his or her own race, those who support painful experimentation on animals assume that respect for other species does not count as much as respect for members of his or her own species. Restricting respect for life to a certain species is to perform an injustice similar to racism or sexism. Nor does a right to be treated with respect rest on being a member of a certain species. An insane person has a right to be treated with respect, yet he or she may not be able to act rationally. This right to be treated with respect does not depend on an ability to reason. Moreover, it is argued, the lives of all creatures, great and small, have value and are worthy of respect. If it is wrong to inflict pain on a human being, it is just as wrong to inflict pain on an animal. Pain is an intrinsic evil whether it is experienced by a child, an adult, or an animal. The researcher who forces rats to choose between electric shocks and starvation to see if they develop ulcers does so because he or she knows that rats have nervous systems much like humans and feel the pain of shocks in a similar way. Pointing to the words of the nineteenth-century utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham, animal welfare advocates claim that the morally relevant question about animals is not "Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer ?" And, animals do in fact suffer, and do in fact feel pain. Those who argue that painful experimentation on animals should be halted, or at least curtailed, maintain that pain is an intrinsic evil, and any action that causes pain to another creature is simply not morally permissible. Whether such experiments should be allowed to continue has become a matter for public debate. But this growing criticism of painful experimentation on animals is matched by a growing concern over the threat restrictions on the use of animals would pose to scientific progress. Animal rights advocates are pressing government agencies to impose heavy restrictions on animal research. Reports show that at least 10 percent of these animals do not receive painkillers. An estimated eight million are used in painful experiments. Copies of the videotape were sent to the media, to University officials, and to government agencies which eventually suspended federal funds for the experiments.Ībout 20 million animals are experimented on and killed annually, three-fourths for medical purposes and the rest to test various products. They took videotapes recording the deliberate and methodical inflicting of severe head injuries on unanesthetized chained baboons. Three years earlier, members of the group invaded the Experimental Head Injury Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania where scientists had been engaged in research on head trauma, a condition which now claims more that 50,000 lives a year. Credit for the fire was claimed by the Animal Liberation Front, a clandestine international group committed to halting experimentation on animals. In the spring of 1987, a veterinary lab at the University of California at Davis was destroyed by a fire that caused $3.5 million in damage.
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