In the debate over animal experiments, the issue is compassion, not rights.
David Navon | Yedioth Ahronoth, 27.1.01
A proposed amendment to the Animal Welfare Law was recently tabled in the Knesset, banning the use of animals for scientific research except to save lives, and researchers whose scientific work is at stake have found themselves on the defensive.
The background is well known: in the past, animal lovers spoke in the name of preventing cruelty to animals. Today they cry out in the name of animal rights. You might think that the existence of such rights is as self-evident as the existence of the sun. But a right is, after all, a social concept. Human beings created a social contract, and since then they have seen themselves as having rights within their society. By contrast, the relationship between human beings and everything else that exists in our world is not based on the concept of rights as we understand it in the human context. Toward certain animals, we behave with a consideration rooted in compassion.
It is possible to perform a semantic exercise and expand the concept of rights so that "rights" are granted to certain animals too, and perhaps to every organism, to every system that shows a trace of intelligence (for example, futuristic robots). But this expansion is itself a kind of institutionalized compassion, and its result is blurred concepts.
It is important to recall a simple distinction: in human society, normative behavior is derived from the equal status of the members of society. In nature, the basis of behavior is the struggle for survival. The human species is no exception to this. People joining together into a society required a certain renunciation of egocentrism within the society, not outside it. Once people were given some respite from the struggle for existence, they had time to show consideration for animals, in the spirit of what sets humans apart. That is fitting and proper, but there is no need to get carried away.
As for norms: there is a chance that we will try to spare animals unnecessary suffering, not that we will refrain from using them for our needs. Everyone is free, of course, to impose one restriction or another on themselves, but not to impose it on others.
As for limits: not only do our lives come before the lives of animals in our eyes, and not only is it hard to know which research will eventually lead to saving human lives, we also see nothing wrong in killing a number of animals if there is a chance that it will improve the quality of life of disabled people, of sick people, or of ordinary people struck by a severe stomachache. Moreover, the human species went from the caves to the age of supercomputers because it used its genetic advantage to understand the world more and more. Advancing this understanding, today as well, is not a luxury, and it justifies experiments on animals.
As for the objects of our concern: the ability to feel pain is fairly widespread in the animal world. But our hearts go out to only part of it. In a country where hundreds of millions of vertebrates are killed for food every year, the uproar over a few dozen pets (cats and monkeys) sacrificed every year for the development of drugs or for brain research seems completely out of proportion. Could it be that the knights of the order of animal rights also apply double standards?
Above all, animal experiments are already subject to the approval of the National Council for Experiments on Animals, which includes representatives of academia, the public and animal welfare organizations. Their judgment is no less sound than that of the initiators of the amendment to the law. What is the point of shackling it?