I have just read a thesis by Peter Singer that became a philosophical bombshell back in 1975: Animal Liberation. This is the book that made Ingrid Newkirk changed her way of thinking and created PETA; a groundbreaking work awakening and inspiring lots of worldwide movements. It's been 45 years since its release, does it still hold up to these days? The answer is yes, it is still relevant. Even though I don't agree 100% with this book, I would like to highlight and spread the awareness of some ethical concerns that I agree upon in this book, starting with animal experimentation
The basic principle of equality and the interference of pain
Equality does not imply that we must treat all groups in the exact same way. Nonsense that we give animals the right to vote as humans, or men the right to do abortion as women. The basic principle of equality does not require equal or identical TREATMENT, it requires equal CONSIDERATION. Jeremy Bentham incorporated the essential basis of moral equality into his systems of ethics by means of this formula: "Each to count for one and none for more than one" -- the interests of every being affected by any action are to be taken into account and given the same weight as the like interests of other being. A black man with an IQ score of 100 should be given equal consideration as a white man with doctor degree. We can imply that our concern for others and our readiness to consider their interests ought not to depend on how they look like or what capability they possess but adjusted more onto their various needs and rights for well being. I have cited these words from Jeremy Bentham in my other post:
"A full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal than an infant of a week or even a month old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?"
The capacity for suffering and enjoyment is a prerequisite for having interests at all, do animals have this? Do animals feel pain? We know humans can feel pain from the direct experience of pain that we have but we cannot directly experience anyone else's pain. Then how do we know that anyone else feel pain? Pain is a state of consciousness that can never be observed. Behavior like writhing or screaming is not pain itself, we can only infer that others are feeling pain from external indications. So this is interference, but a reasonable one, based on observations of behavior and the fact that every other human has a nervous system like ours that can be assumed to produce similar feelings about pain. Animals have nervous systems very like ours, and even though human being has a more developed cerebral cortex, this part of the brain is responsible for thinking functions. Impulses, emotions, and feelings are located in the diencephalon which is well developed in animals especially mammals and birds. Animals can feel pain.
The sufficient importance to justify animal suffering on human researches
Does every human experiment on animals have the sufficient importance and benefit to justify the suffering? For medicines or vaccinations, maybe yes. But there is this bizarre world of psychological and military experiments causing great sufferings for animals with unclear benefits for human. I'm giving you a few sample cases:
Case 1: Professor Harry F. Harlow and animals psychopathology inducement
Harlow worked at the Primate Research Center in Wisconsin with years of researches on monkeys with his works continued by his associates and students following his death. One of his research is to create a social isolation for monkeys from birth onwards with total maternal deprivation with no contact with any animal or human by raising them in a stainless steel chamber and bare wire cages resulting in " sufficiently severe and enduring early isolation reduces these animals to a social-emotional level in which the primary social responsiveness is fear.".
(I'm citing and editing this part directly from the book) The other experiment is trying to induce psychopathology on infant monkeys with a technique that appeared not to be working. They were then visited by John Bowlby, a British psychiatrist. According to Harlow’s account, Bowlby listened to the story of their troubles and then toured the Wisconsin laboratory. He asked, “Why are you trying to produce psychopathology in monkeys? You already have more psychopathological monkeys in the in the laboratory than have ever been seen on the face of the earth.”
Bowlby, incidentally, was a leading researcher on the consequences of maternal deprivation, but his research was conducted with children, primarily war orphans, refugees, and institutionalized children. As far back as 1951, before Harlow even began his research on nonhuman primates, Bowlby concluded:
"The evidence has been reviewed. It is submitted that evidence is now such that it leaves no room for doubt regarding the general proposition that the prolonged deprivation of the young child of maternal care may have grave and far-reaching effects on his character and so on the whole of his future life."
This did not deter Harlow and his colleagues from devising and carrying out their monkey experiments. They have this "fascinating" idea of inducing depression by "allowing baby monkeys to attach to cloth surrogate mothers who could become monsters":
The first of these monsters was a cloth monkey mother who, upon schedule or demand, would eject high-pressure compressed air. It would blow the animal’s skin practically off its body. What did the baby monkey do? It simply clung tighter and tighter to the mother, because a frightened infant clings to its mother at all costs. We did not achieve any psychopathology.
However, we did not give up. We built another surrogate monster mother that would rock so violently that the baby’s head and teeth would rattle. All the baby did was cling tighter and tighter to the surrogate. The third monster we built had an embedded wire frame within its body which would spring forward and eject the infant from its ventral surface. The infant would subsequently pick itself off the floor, wait for the frame to return into the cloth body, and then cling again to the surrogate. Finally, we built our porcupine mother. On command, this mother would eject sharp brass spikes over all of the ventral surface of its body. Although the infants were distressed by these pointed rebuffs, they simply waited until the spikes receded and then returned and clung to the mother.
These results, the experimenters remark, were not so surprising, since the only recourse of an injured child is to cling to its mother.
Eventually, Harlow and Suomi gave up on the artificial monster mothers because they found something better: a real monkey mother who was a monster. To produce such mothers, they reared female monkeys in isolation, and then tried to make them pregnant. Unfortunately the females did not have normal sexual relations with male monkeys, so they had to be made pregnant by a technique that Harlow and Suomi refer to as a “rape rack.” When the babies were born the experimenters observed the monkeys. They found that some simply ignored the infants, failing to cuddle the crying baby to the breast as normal monkeys do when they hear their baby cry. The other pattern of behavior observed was different:
The other monkeys were brutal or lethal. One of their favorite tricks was to crush the infant’s skull with their teeth. But the really sickening behavior pattern was that of smashing the infant’s face to the floor, and then rubbing it back and forth
Just sick. Harlow and friends keep doing lots of research including creating a well of despair for monkeys where young monkeys are confined in a stainless steel vertical chamber for 45 days resulting in monkeys that sit clasping around their bodies instead of moving around and exploring their surroundings even after release. The conclusion in their report is:
"Whether [the results] can be traced specifically to variables such as chamber shape, chamber size, duration of confinement, age at time of confinement or, more likely, to a combination of these and other variables remains the subject of further research".
There's also this "tunnel of terror experiments" and any other awful stuffs you could find just by typing his name. the other example is Martin Reite of the University of Colorado who conducted maternal deprivation experiments on bonnet monkeys and pigtailed macaques. He was aware that Jane Goodall’s observations of orphaned wild chimpanzees described “profound behavioral disturbances, with sadness or depressive affective changes as major components.” But because “in comparison with monkey studies, relatively little has been published on experimental separations in great apes,” he and other experimenters decided to study seven infant chimpanzees who had been separated from their mothers at birth and reared in a nursery environment.
They apparently felt no need to address the basic question of why we should be doing any experiments on maternal deprivation in animals at all. They did not even try to justify their experiments by claiming they were of benefit to human beings. That we already have extensive observations of orphaned chimpanzees in the wild seems not to have been of interest to them. Their attitude was plain: this has been done with animals of one species, but not with animals of another, so let’s do it to them.
Case 2: "Learned helplessness" experiments
Many experiments are done in regard of a psychology terms called "learned helplessness". One of it is for dogs to be placed in two compartment divided by a barrier which was set at a low height (where the dogs can jump). Hundreds of intense electrics where sent through a grid floor causing the dogs to jump. But later the dividing walls are set higher, the dogs still yip and jump to no avail and smash their heads against the wall and begin to showing symptoms such as shrieking, trembling, yelping, urination, defecation, and so on. But after 10-12 days, the dogs ceased to resist. The experiments reported themselves "impressed" to be able to induce helplessness by repeating inescapable electric shock. This "learned helplessness" experiment were refined over and over again by various scientists in dogs, rats, and even goldfish.
These experiments have inflicted acute, prolonged pain on numerous animals: first to prove the theory, then to disprove the theory, and finally to support modified versions of the original theory. One of them was training rats with electric shocks until they learned to fight by striking out each other in an upright position or biting. Then after all the subjects have been trained, they were all killed, shaved, and examined for wounds. The paper concluded that "results were not useful in understanding the offensive or defensive nature of the shock-induced response".
Case 3: Bureau of Child Research and electric shocks
Bureau of Child Research in Kansas has been inflicting electric shocks on animals for various researches. One of the experiment is for Shetland ponies to be deprived of water until they are really thirsty and then given a water bowl that can be electrified. Two loudspeakers are place on the left and right of each pony, when a sound's coming from the left the water will be electrified. They soon learned to stop drinking if there's a sign from the left speaker. The research continues with placing the speakers closely together causing the ponies unable to distinguish the difference and electrified. This experiment were then applied to white rats, kangaroo rats, wood rats, dogs, cats, hedgehogs, monkeys, opossums, seal, dolphins, and elephants with a conclusion of levels of difficulties in distinguishing the direction of noises in between those animals.
It is not easy to see how this research is going to benefit children.
Case 4: Veterinarian and heat-producing microwaves
Very often too, basic medical research has been going on for decades and much of it in the long run, turns out to be quite pointless. For example experiment on animals on the effect of heat: S. Michaelson from the University of Rochester once exposed dogs and rabbits to heat-producing microwaves until their temperatures reached the critical level of 38.3 degrees Celsius. Both made desperate attempts to escape and for rabbits they die within 40 minutes. The conclusion is that "an increase in heat from microwaves produces damage indistinguishable from fever in general."
What possible justification can there be for the infliction of so much suffering? Researchers are all human beings that want to get on with their careers, to be promoted, and have their work read and discussed just like all of us. But unlike philosophers or historians who publish to improve their career by doing little harm beyond wasting papers or memory on their computer, those who work involves experimenting on animals can cause severe pain or prolonged suffering. Their work should therefore subject to much stricter standard of necessity.
The tolerance of cruelties inflicted on members of other species
How can these things happen? How can people spend their working days driving monkeys into lifelong depression or heating dogs to death? How can they then go home to dinner with their families? It is because they allow themselves to regard the animals they experiment on as a mere items / equipments. No one seems to care about how trivial the purpose for which the animals suffered may have been. Thomas Gennarelli at the University of Pennsylvania made experiments to inflict head injuries on monkeys and then examine the brain. Animal Liberation Front broke into the lab and saw the videotapes of his experiments. It was a bunch of conscious, unanesthetized baboons struggling as they were being strapped down before the head injuries were inflicted. They saw animals writhing and apparently coming out of anesthesia as surgeons were operating on their exposed brains. They also heard the scientists mocking and laughing at frightened, suffering animals. The scientist clearly had a species bias.
The exploitation of laboratory animals is part of the larger problem of speciesism and it is unlikely to be eliminated altogether until speciesism itself is eliminated. Surely one day, though, our children’s children, reading about what was done in laboratories in the twentieth century, will feel the same sense of horror and incredulity at what otherwise civilized people could do that we now feel when we read about the atrocities of the Roman gladiatorial arenas or the eighteenth-century slave trade
Without Animal Liberation, it would be so difficult to talk about animal rights and be taken seriously, rather than labeled a fruitcake. These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find a philosopher who seriously argues that animals should have no moral standing at all. It’s mainstream ethics. Thank you Peter Singer for making a change. A very influential book to many that hasn't lost much of its impact over time.
