Re: A Star Is Torn: Animal Rights and Medical Research

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Wojtek wrote:

>As I see, animal experimentation continues not beacuse of some utilitarian
>calculus balancing human and animal life, but because our universities
>produce graduates by thousands, and those graduates need JOBS.  It is
>intellectual-commodity keynesianism, if you will - the sole purpose of it
>is to keep research workers employed and their "satanic mills" in business.
>The use value of that employment does not matter just as it does not
>matter in the military version of keynesianism.  So it could well be that
>most of animal research is garbage, as you argue, just as much of the
>military gizmos are - but the only purpose of this madness is to keep
>capitalism going and NOT to produce any use-value.

I agree with Gordon & Wojtek that much of animal experiments may well be
garbage.  For instance, Peter Singer writes in _Practical Ethics_ about the
cruelty of the Draize test and the LD 50.  The Draize test evaluates the
safety of new shampoos and cosmetics by dripping concentrated solutions of
them into the eyes of rabbits.  The LD 50 tests new food additives such as
artificial colorings and preservatives; it's a test designed to find the
"lethal dose" or level of consumption that will make 50 per cent of a
sample of animal die.  It is only in an economy driven by the need to
accumulate for the sake of accumulation that companies are compelled to
invent an endless "variety" (well, pseudo-variety) of new shampoos,
cosmetics, food preservatives, and artificial colorings every year.  The
root cause of unnecessary cruelty is a neoclassical economy of "scarcity
and unlimited wants."  "Animal rights" activists, as well as most Greens,
are, however, not aware of the need to abolish the mode of production that
gives rise to unnecessary experiments because there is no such thing as
"enough" shampoos and food colorings under capitalism.

Those who think like Peter Singer believe that it is "speciesism" that
makes humans use animals for medical and other experiments, but I disagree.
As a matter of fact, animals are not necessarily treated worse than humans
in this calculated production of inhumanity.  Peter Singer writes:

*****   In many countries, the armed forces perform atrocious experiments
on animals that rarely come to light.  To give just one example: at the
U.S. Armed Forces Radiobiology Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland, rhesus
monkeys have been trained to run inside a large wheel.  If they slow down
too much, the wheel slows down, too, and the monkeys get an electric shock.
Once the monkeys are trained to run for long periods, they are given lethal
doses of radiation.  Then, while sick and vomiting, they are forced to
continue to run until they drop.  This is supposed to provide information
on the capacities of soldiers to continue to fight after a nuclear attack.
(_Practical Ethics_ 66)   *****

It appears that Peter Singer is unaware that a huge number of *humans* have
been harmed by atomic experiments of various kinds.  As Paul Tibbets
discusses in _The Atomic Cafe_, Hiroshima was chosen as an A-bomb target
because until then it had not been destroyed, unlike Tokyo and other major
cities; the U.S. government wanted a "virgin target" to test the
destructiveness of the new weapon.  Add, to the dead and hibaksha of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hundreds of thousands of atomic veterans (soldiers
who were forced to attend the atomic tests), test site workers, miners,
weapons production workers, "downwinders," Pacific Islanders, fishermen of
the Hukuryumaru; and more pertinent to the question at hand, human subjects
in radiation experiments (there were more than 4,000 radiation experiments
-- all in violation of the Nuremberg Code).

Arguing against "speciesism" and for the absolute prohibition of medical
experiments obscures the politico-economic causes of cruel & unnecessary
animal _and_ human experiments.

Yoshie