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Negotiating Animal Rights
Dr Kate Rawls
'I don't think you'd have to kill too many [researchers]. I think for five lives, ten lives, fifteen human lives, we could save a million, two million, non-human lives.'
The North American animal rights activist who said this, Jerry Vlasak, was banned from entering the UK in September 2004. Vlasak later claimed that he'd not intended to encourage anyone to translate his words into action. Others have been less reserved though. A minority within the animal rights movement have both endorsed and employed violent tactics. The details make depressing reading, and have obscured the real debate about how we humans treat our fellow animals.
Dr Kate Rawles is a freelance philosopher and a senior lecturer in the School of Sport and Outdoor Studies at St Martin's College, Ambleside. She previously lectured in philosophy at Lancaster University, specialising in environmental ethics, sustainable development and animal welfare. Here she lays out the issues of animal rights for us all to see.
Violence obscures the real issues
Employees of the UK-based product development company, Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), were regularly subjected to intimidation, abusive phone calls and even arson attacks, until an injunction prevented activists from approaching employees' homes. Now, suppliers of HLS are targeted instead. Workers at a guinea pig farm have been labelled paedophiles in leaflets produced by activists and have found bombs under their cars. One woman describes being woken at three in the morning, when in the house alone, by rocks smashing through her windows. Similar tactics have been used against HLS shareholders. The UK government has responded with injunctions, ASBOs (anti-social behaviour orders) and pledges to bring in new legislation that will protect researchers and others from extreme activists.
It is hard to deny that this intimidation is having the desired effect. At Oxford, plans to build an �18 million animal research laboratory have been on hold since July 2004, when a key building contractor, Montpellier, pulled out. Their shareholders had received letters advising them to sell if they wanted to avoid reprisals from animal rights activists. A cement company had already withdrawn for the same reasons. At Cambridge, the proposed primate research facility has also been cancelled, after threats from animal rights protestors. Meanwhile, Huntingdon Life Sciences bears huge costs in protecting its staff and insuring its premises. What's more, it has transferred its shares to the US market, which doesn't reveal addresses of shareholders.
These militant animal rights 'successes' come at a high cost though. The people whose lives are terrorized with vandalism, car bombs and death threats are often only tenuously linked to animal research. Those who condone this violence argue that it is unfortunately necessary as a means to a worthwhile end (that is, putting a stop to animal research). The animal rights movement opposes using animals as a means to an end, but in targeting human animals as a way of stopping animal experimentation, this is precisely what they are doing themselves � they are using the human animal as a means to an end. Hence terrorizing humans for a worthwhile end undermines their own argument. This profound inconsistency, coupled with compassion and anger felt on behalf of those targeted, makes it all too easy to dismiss the whole animal rights movement, especially within the current terrorist-sensitive climate.
But rejecting the idea of animal rights out of hand is a mistake. A thoughtful debate badly needs to be opened up here, not closed down. The animal rights movement (most members of which are passionately opposed to violence) has serious things to say. It confronts us with an important critique on a range of human practices that involve the use of animals, raising genuinely difficult ethical concerns. And it challenges us, if we are open to it, to rethink our world view; to reassess how we see ourselves as humans in the bigger scheme of things
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