Animal rights? (1986)

From the July 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every day over ten thousand animals die in laboratories in Britain. They are burned, blinded, scalded, poisoned, cut up, and many of the other unpleasant things you can think of. Eighty per cent of the experiments take place without anaesthetic. This is what is known as "vivisection".

Recent times have seen the rise of vociferous campaigns against this and against other forms of animal cruelty. Today, we not only have the RSPCA and League Against Cruel Sports, but also an active National Anti-Vivisection Society, Animal Aid, Compassion in World Farming, Greenpeace, the Animal Liberation Front, and others. Nothing — not even the nuclear threat — is more calculated to fill the postbags of newspapers than the appearance of a letter or article on the subject of animals. When my own local paper recently published a letter about the use of animals, readers wrote in in large numbers. The writer of the original letter had said that his wife had died of cancer and had more experiments been allowed to take place on animals, a cure may have been found and she might still be alive. He went on to say that campaigners against animal experiments were killers because their efforts to limit such experiments were condemning many sick people to death. One of the replies, from Brian Gunn, General Secretary of the National Anti-Vivisection Society, showed that the writer had little to fear. Gunn pointed out that new parliamentary legislation against vivisection was leaving the situation very much as it had been since the first Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876. It would not stop the experiments at present taking place. The main difference in the new (1986) law is the fact that it grades experiments from one to five according to the intensity of pain they cause. And in one sense, say the animal campaigners, the new law is worse than the old one as it no longer insists that animals be killed after they have been experimented on but allows them to be used for a second experiment if they are still in fit condition.

Brian Gunn also mentioned that animals are not just used for medical purposes but figure on a large scale in tests on cosmetics, alcohol and tobacco and in warfare and behavioural and psychological tests. And if we look a little more closely, we can add to the animal-tested list innocuous seeming products like oven cleaner, candles, shampoo, polish, anti-freeze and detergents, as well as the cosmetics which the campaigners frequently condemn and which they are trying to combat by their own list of "cruelty-free cosmetics".

But the campaigners' concerns stretch further than just vivisection. I recently received through the post a letter from the Save the Seals campaign of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which graphically described the clubbing to death of baby seals. It appealed for a donation and asked me to pledge myself to boycotting Canadian fish products. In the letter was a small folded brochure showing Canadian fishermen killing baby seals. A notice on the outside said I would find the scenes "extremely disturbing". and I did. Not long before, I had received a similar request from Greenpeace to help its work of trying to save the whales from extinction. And when the Socialist Party debated with the local Animal Rights group last year in Swansea, it was this kind of literature our opponents gave out as well as material on vivisection.

Different pro-animal groups have different methods. The more conservative try putting pressure on governments, firms and educational institutions by letters to the press and MPs and organising petitions. Others picket fur shops, circuses and research establishments. The most "radical". like the Animal Liberation Front, favour "direct action" such as "liberating" animals from laboratories, damaging equipment and sabotaging hunts. One thing that unites them all, however, is the idea that, since animals cannot organise their own protest, they must be protected by those who can. "We are the voice for the voiceless", as they put it, and it's hard not to be sympathetic to that voice and indeed to the millions of tortured creatures it speaks for.

But can the voice be an effective one? The animal campaigners point in particular to the other methods of experimentation that can and already are being used. First there is the use of cell and tissue cultures which avoid the direct use of animals and can utilise human samples taken from such sources as placenta and parts of the uterus removed during hysterectomy. The human cultures are said to be more reliable for research into illness since animal bodies often react differently to drugs than human ones and examples of animal-tested disaster drugs like Thalidomide and Eraldin are easy to find. Cultures have already been used for work on cancer, diabetes and arthritis and the production of vaccines, hormones and enzymes. Then there are a number of computer assisted techniques, in particular the mathematical modelling and quantum pharmacology methods, which have already been used. Finally, among other methods still in their early stages but being developed are chemical analysis by mass spectrometry, genetic engineering, and scanning by sophisticated photographic techniques.

Why then, given the existence and use of other methods, are animals still dying in their millions? The answer is quite simply that animals are cheap. Since the aim of research in today's world is not primarily to alleviate suffering but to yield products that can be sold on the market at a profit (or at least to smooth the overall running of the profit process), then clearly the single most essential factor is cheapness. No firm producing drugs, cosmetics, oven cleaner, or detergents will pay for research without the prospect of a product they can sell at a profit. And since it must also be assessed whether the amount of resources being put into a research project is worth the profit it will finally produce, research sponsors will inevitably want the work to be carried out as cheaply as possible. And if cheapness means using animals rather than other methods that may be available. then animals will be used, regardless of their suffering.

The Animal Rights movement's literature often recognises that profit is the driving force of animal exploitation. But. curiously, they never seem to look beyond the profit system for a possible solution to the problem. They would like "compassion" to enter into the production process (the organisation. Compassion in World Farming, encapsulates this in its title), but if the driving force of production is profit, is compassion for animals likely to come anything but a poor second? Especially when we consider that compassion for humans comes a very poor second to profit. Every year millions of human beings are killed, maimed, ill-treated or driven from their homes in the wars and power struggles associated with the pursuit of profit in many parts of the globe. Every year millions of human beings are allowed to die of starvation because they can't afford to buy food at a price that would allow its production or distribution to be profitable. Every year millions of human beings, even in so-called civilised countries like Britain, are set at odds with one another by profit society's competitive ethic and hostile social environment. Many are victims of material want and mental distress leading to such problems as violence, theft, drug addiction, suicide and death by hypothermia. Can we expect compassion for animals on any significant scale in a society whose social organisation so militates against compassion for human beings?

The necessary change is to a society where production is for use not profit, where people co-operate voluntarily to produce what they need and enjoy free and equal access to what they have produced. What we are talking about is a society without wages and salaries, without buying and selling, without money and banks and stock exchanges. It may seem a tall order, but it's certainly less of a tall order than emancipating animals in the framework of the present society, and in fact socialism is entirely within our grasp once the majority of us decide we want it and are prepared to take democratic political action to bring it about.

How will the position of animals be different in such a society? It is hard to imagine that, just as the peace and security of socialism will change people's attitudes towards their fellow human beings, their attitudes towards animals will not change too. In a truly human society, compassion for other living creatures can hardly fail to be something that will concern us. On a practical level alone, many of today's experiments will simply be unnecessary. For instance, weapons won't be needed, so animals won't be used in their development or testing. Many of the drugs used today will probably not be produced, since so many illnesses are produced by the conditions we live in rather than by intrinsic human factors. Socialism will not be a society of tranquillisers, antidepressants or pain killers. Nor will it be a society in which today's killers — cancer and heart disease — are widespread. According to Philip Churchward, "it is widely accepted that cancer is a largely preventable disease. Seventy to ninety per cent of cancers are caused by environmental factors, with smoking and diets high in animal fat as the two main offenders".

But wouldn't animal experiments be needed for the remaining 10-30 per cent of cancer victims? And what about the production of candles, weedkiller, polish and (if we still use them) cosmetics and tobacco? Well, first of all in a society where there are no cost factors to be placed above human need, all methods of research that exist will be used in preference to making animals suffer. Then, even where there seems to be no alternative to the use of animals for a particular purpose, we will think carefully before condemning other sentient beings to suffering or death. When people take their democratic decisions on such matters (and all decisions in socialism will be democratic), they will have to weigh the benefit to themselves and to the community as a whole of using animals against the debasement of humanity this involves. They will have to ask themselves whether the benefit to humanity is so vital as to be worth causing defenceless creatures to suffer. This writer's guess is that it will rarely, if ever, be.

In their letters to the press, the anti-vivisectionists have the habit of signing off with a "Yours for Human and Animal Rights", and in so doing they highlight the similarity of their position to the countless other organisations campaigning not for animal reforms but for human ones — Shelter, Help the Aged, Oxfam, Amnesty International, War on Want, Child Poverty Action and so on. And both sets of "rights” campaigners have the same dilemma. They are campaigning for rights within the framework of a system where any such notion must always be subordinated to the needs of profit. In other words, they are fighting to get rid of problems without aiming to get rid of the system that produces the problems. Their fight must always therefore be a losing one. Calming the symptoms is the best they can hope for, because as long as the root cause of the pain is still there, then the pain will keep coming back, and indeed will break out in other places too.

The answer, as perceived by the anti-vivisectionists themselves, is political. But not political in the sense of demanding, as they put it, "open government", or of appealing to governments to act in the interests of animals and against the interests of profit. Political in the sense of our taking the situation into our own hands and peacefully and democratically voting to get rid of governments, to get rid of the profit system, and with it to get rid of the bottomless pit of problems, for both humans and animals, that it inevitably produces.

Howard Moss