Usually, when I read a book for review, I come out firmly on one side or the other. Some pretty well suck, and don’t work well for the purpose they were written. Others, are just awesome, and appeal to a wide audience. Still more are awesome at appealing to exactly who they are supposed to appeal to.
And then there are some…like this one. It’s a good book. It’s a necessary book. But it left even Sci, someone who supports well-constructed and carefully performed animal research, very thoughtful. And this is a good thing.
“An Odyssey with Animals: A veterinarian’s reflections on the animal rights and welfare debate” by Adrian R. Morrison.
This book is a necessary book. It is a book on the animal rights and welfare debate, from someone who has been on the receiving end of some rather interesting “attentions” from animal rights activists. For someone who has suffered so terribly at the hands of activists, Morrison delivers a surprisingly compassionate and balanced view of the motivations of activists, and for that alone you have to admire this book. He gives a concise and accurate account of the history of animal rights activities, what it is that animal researchers actually do, and some of his opinions on why what animal researchers do with animals is justified.
It is important to make a distinction between ‘animal rights’ and ‘animal welfare’. No scientist now is going to argue with the importance of animal welfare. And it’s true that the activities of rights activists have helped to make important steps in the improvement of animal welfare in biomedical research. But there is a difference between the activism that gets welfare improvements, and the activism that bombs cars and sets buildings on fire. Morrison is very careful to emphasize the importance of animal welfare, and how no scientist will agree to work under conditions where there are no welfare standards.
And this is largely the case. None of us LIKE hurting animals, and every one of us would rather work with something else, if that something else could give us the most accurate picture of the problem we are trying to fix. And animals are hard to work with. They require food, housing, and care for their welfare, all of which are expensive. There are personal and pragmatic reasons for wanting to work in other models, as soon as those models come available. Animal researchers are not heartless. They care greatly for their animals, ensuring that they are not in pain (except where necessary, as in pain studies), that they are clean and housed well, and that they get adequate food, treats, and social time. And many of us are not afraid to be guinea pigs ourselves. As a scientist, I consider it my duty to participate in studies on humans to bring us closer to an answer. Morrison does a great job here. In fact, he does a great job throughout the book. Where the book runs into issues is not the way the arguments are delivered, it’s the arguments themselves.
When it comes right down to it, there are only philosophical ideas as to whether animal research is right or wrong. Though we know that animals can suffer pain (and animal researchers do their best to alleviate the pain in every possible circumstance), how do we know that they can suffer in the same way a human can suffer? How can we KNOW that animals have an inner life as complex as a human’s? Obviously, these are things we can only assume, not know, as we cannot get inside the experience of an animal to find out.
It is hard to justify animal research on moral grounds. Yes, we know it is necessary. But is it RIGHT? The problem is, as with most ethical arguments, there are many points of view, and many shades of grey in a very complicated issue. Morisson covers them all, and though I’m not sure I agree with his own conclusions, I’m not so sure I could come up with something better.
One of the things I found most interesting about the history of animal rights is reason given for the time of its emergence. Animal rights concerns (though not animal welfare concerns) are relatively recent, occurring only in the 20th century. The philosopher Bulliet give one of the most compelling reasons for the emergence of animal rights activism in Western culture in his division of history into “predomestic”, “domestic”, and “postdomestic” eras. The predomestic era obviously refers to the time before agriculture, in which the relationship of humans and animals was on a bit more of an even footing, with predator and prey relationships. The domestic era, which brings us up pretty much around the 1950s, was an era in which humans and animals worked and lived together in domestic settings. You raised the cow that was your dinner, or at least you knew the person who did. You knew, at a visceral level, that the cows in the field and pigs in the barn were going to become dinner, and you knew, because you probably saw or did it yourself, how they were going to meet their ends.
And then there’s the postdomestic era. Welcome to now, when 10{9f43b4361d9a125bc126dd2a2d1949be02545ec69880430bc4fed2272fd72da3} of the population makes 90{9f43b4361d9a125bc126dd2a2d1949be02545ec69880430bc4fed2272fd72da3} of the food. When most children never see a real cow up close and personal unless it’s on a school field trip. And it’s in this era, when our connection to animals becomes tenuous at best, that people believe that we can do without them. It is only in the postdomestic era that vegetarianism has become popular (we’re talking in Western culture here, in a Judeo-Christian paradigm), only in the postdomestic era that people protest over whether or not their meat has a name.
Biomedical research has grown up into the postdomestic era. And biomedical researchers, like farmers, have intense, close contact with their animals. But most of the populace does not. Like agriculture, most of the population now doesn’t really understand what goes into animal research on a daily basis. From a lack of understanding comes fear and revulsion. Morrison has done a good job of trying to let readers know what does go into animal research. But it may not be enough.
Open access, not publishing, but research, is the only way to really educate people on what is going on. We need to show people what we are doing, what welfare steps we are taking. And we need to show people that we have hearts, that we don’t love to kill, and that, when it’s all over and we retire, we will be sorry to give up the search for knowledge and cures, but we will sigh with relief, because we will never have to hurt an animal again. What we do is necessary, it comes with the amazing highs of scientific discovery and the discovery of cures and treatments, but it comes with a price.
But with open access comes vulnerability. It is difficult to be open when there are people waiting to firebomb your car. It is difficult to share research methods when photos of your animals end up on the web, and when you end up labeled as a “vivisectionist”, and when information is released on where your kids go to school. When flyers are sent to your neighbors, telling horrible lies of how you torture your animals. When death threats appear in your email. For there to be open access, there must be trust. Demanding open access while vandalizing our work is NOT the way to foster trust.
I can tell that, for Morrison, this was a brave book to write. He has already suffered the attacks of animal rights activists, and the publication of a book that passionately defends animal research may end up drawing more fire. He’s a brave man, and his message is important. But it’s a difficult book. No matter what view you hold, Morrison may make you mad. But he will also make you think. A dangerous pastime, but an important one.
“An Odyssey with Animals: A veterinarian’s reflections on the animal rights and welfare debate” by Adrian R. Morrison.
Ranking (out of 5): 4/5 brains
