, 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 A cement company had already withdrawn for the same reasons.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
What constitutes decent treatment?
First, it is worth noting that we don't need the language of rights to argue that having bought non-human animals into human social and economic systems, we should treat them decently. More or less all parties in the debate over the use of animals in medical and scientific research in fact agree that sentient animals (those capable of experiencing pain and pleasure) are owed such treatment.
What different parties in the debate mean by 'decent treatment', and to what extent this is translated into practice, is another matter. From within the research industry, decent treatment typically means keeping animal pain and distress to a minimum; keeping careful guard against unnecessary experiments, such as those that duplicate research findings; and using non-sentient animals when possible.
From the farther end of the animal rights spectrum, the issue is not just that we sometimes inflict pain and suffering on the animals we use, but that we use them at all. From their perspective, treating sentient animals simply as a means to human ends, like any other item of laboratory equipment, is unacceptable no matter how carefully they are treated.
The whole institution of animal-dependent research is held to be profoundly unjust, and a parallel is sometimes drawn with slavery. It's argued that as with slavery, the ethically appropriate action isn't simply to tidy up the institution by reducing suffering; the only ethically sound course of action is to abolish the practice altogether. From this perspective the decent treatment of animals means that they shouldn't be used as means to our ends at all.
The 'five freedoms' benchmark
The 'five freedoms' provides a powerful way of moderating between those who are for and those who are against the use of animals for human ends. Back in the 1960s the highly respected, UK government appointed, Brambell Committee argued that the decent treatment of sentient animals should mean ensuring they have good welfare. Good welfare, they said, is achieved by ensuring that an