 Animal Experiments
Organized efforts to improve humane treatment of animals began in the nineteenth century in England and the United States. The early goals were to prevent cruelty and oppose experiments on animals. The first US animal rights organizations originated in the 1970s. Their actions and activities were much broader and included both political and social objectives.
The close ties between humans and animals go back many centuries. Keith Thomas describes the close associations in England where animals and families shared living quarters, where pets providing companionship were often fed better than servants, and where horses were so valuable for work and transportation that no custom of eating their meat developed.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, writers began to discuss animal feelings of pain and suffering, vivisection (the surgical operations performed upon live animals during experiments), cruel treatment of animals raised and slaughtered for food, and the religious teachings that influenced humane treatment of both humans and animals. This new emphasis upon animals' feelings of sensation in the eighteenth century brought growing criticism of some forms of cruelty. Doubts about the ethics of castrating domestic animals were raised as early as 1714.
Using animals in research is viewed as a brutal consequence of speciesism. Philosophers usually look at research as causing animal suffering, exploiting animals for questionable purposes or benefit to humans, and, when used for testing products, as unreliable. Their solution is to use alternative testing methods for drugs and other products or do without new and nonessential products. In the view of most animal rights activists, the best, most moral solution that society can reach when considering the use of animals in science is not to use them at all.
Although raising and killing animals for food and using them in research are the most widespread "exploitation," animal rights activists also oppose hunting, fur farming, circuses, rodeos, and capturing wild animals for zoos.
The animal rights movement is committed to three goals: (1) the total abolition of the use of animals in science, (2) the total dissolution of commercial animal agriculture, and (3) the total elimination of commercial and sport hunting and trapping. Two decades after Animal Liberation was first published animal activists can cite the move away from testing cosmetics on animals, a reduction in number of animals used in laboratory animal experiments, and efforts in Europe to make livestock and poultry production less stressful. Singer believes it is important to see these reforms as stepping stones on the path to further goals, not as the be-all and end-all of the campaign.
In Switzerland, for instance, laying cages are being phased out. Veal calves must receive iron and roughage in their rations. Pigs must be provided bedding of straw or other material. Standards are established for lighting, flooring materials, and space. However, in 1992, Swiss voters defeated a referendum that would have limited animal experiments only to those deemed essential for medical research.
NAVS educates the public concerning its views of the problems in using animals in product testing, biomedical research, and education. It concentrates specifically on animals used in research, with the objectives of replacing animal experiments, both biomedical and psychological, with other forms of testing and eventually eliminating all laboratory, experiments involving animals.
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