Mathias’s Reviews > Animal Liberation Now > Status Update

How can people who are not sadists spend their working days terrifying infant monkeys, giving mice inescapable electric shocks, and addicting cats to drugs or alcohol? How can they then remove their white coats, wash their hands, and go home to dine comfortably with their families? How can taxpayers allow their money to be used to support these experiments?
The answer lies in the unquestioned acceptance of speciesism

How can people who are not sadists spend their working days terrifying infant monkeys, giving mice inescapable electric shocks, and addicting cats to drugs or alcohol? How can they then remove their white coats, wash their hands, and go home to dine comfortably with their families? How can taxpayers allow their money to be used to support these experiments? The answer lies in the unquestioned acceptance of speciesism

Testing on animals may lead us to miss out on valuable products that are dangerous to animals but not to human beings. Insulin can produce deformities in infant rabbits and mice but not in humans. Morphine, which is calming to human beings, causes mice to go into a frenzy. And as another toxicologist has said: “If penicillin had been judged by its toxicity on guinea pigs, it might never have been used on man.”

Researchers in psychology who use animals face an ethical dilemma: Either the minds of the animals are not like ours, in which case the experiments are unlikely to benefit us and there is less justification for funding and carrying them out; or else the animals do have minds like ours, in which case we ought not to perform on the animal an experiment that would be considered outrageous if performed on one of us.

Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history. — Yuval Noah Harari

Doing the research for this chapter, both in the present edition of this book and for the earlier versions, has always been a deeply disturbing experience. Reading this chapter is unlikely to be a pleasant experience either. But if animals have to undergo these experiments, the least we can do is inform ourselves about them, especially as, in many cases, our taxes are paying for them.