By Jolyon Jenkins
Professor Steven Rose, a biologist who experiments on chicks, accuses the animal rights movement of "cant", "absolutism" and "sanctimonious hypocrisy". I don't speak for the animal rights movement, but I find Rose's arguments suffer from the same defects.
According to Rose, humans have a duty "to behave kindly to other animals, with the minimum of violence and cruelty, not to damage or take their lives insofar as it can be avoided". He describes his own work as "analysing the changes that occur when young chicks learn and remember simple tasks". Curious to learn more (and to discover if there was perhaps the skeleton of a smoking beagle lurking in his wardrobe), I looked up his work. For more than 20 years he has been cutting up the brains of day-old chicks, with occasional interludes to work on rats. The treatment given to the birds has included electric shocks to the brain and, to the rats, long periods of light deprivation. Is this "behaving kindly" — or is Rose suffering from cognitive dissonance?
To browse the pages of the biological journals is to enter an Inferno of the animal kingdom — an underworld where rats, cats, dogs, primates, fish and birds are roasted, frozen, mutilated, poisoned, blinded ... there are few torments the scientists have not tried. Rose's work is comparatively mild — he is not the Dr Mengele of Milton Keynes after all. (Nor should anyone who eats eggs get too sentimental about day-old chicks: the male birds are killed at birth by suffocating them, en masse, in polythene bags.)
I don't deny that some of this experimentation may have beneficial results, although scientists seem to expect us to take this for granted. But the argument is not about utility, but morality. Some people, though not Rose, would claim moral discourse is simply inapplicable to animals. Our everyday practice, though, makes it clear we do think animals are objects of moral concern. But how much concern?
The underlying moral precept, it seems to me, has been provided by philosopher Peter Singer (who adapted it from Kant): everything has a right to equal consideration of its interests. This does not necessarily mean everything should get equal treatment, because not all interests are equal. A cat has no right to education, because it has no interest in being educated. But it does have an interest in avoiding pain, and that interest is directly proportional to its ability to suffer pain. Looked at from the perspective of the suffering subject, an animal's pain is as real to it as a human's pain is to him or her. The vivisectors
rarely deny this, but they seem to say that it is simply less important — that its interests require less consideration. It is as hard to find a chink in this argument as it is to counter the white slaver who simply denies that black suffering matters. Why is animal suffering unimportant? It can hardly be because of intelligence, or language, or "dignity", or any of the other things that are supposed to distinguish humans from animals. Apart from the distasteful consequences for those humans who have none of those characteristics (should we experiment on them?) they seem simply irrelevant to the question of suffering.
There is indeed a moral continuum: the lower down the evolutionary scale you go, the less developed organisms' nervous systems become; at the bottom it's not clear whether they suffer the subjective sensation of pain (as opposed to manifesting avoidance behaviour) at all. But humans and most animals are at similar points on the continuum.
Causing suffering is one issue; killing is another one entirely. The importance of a life depends on many things: the plans and projects the life-holder has, its place within a social network, its sense of self. Rose says that if he had to choose between saving the life of his much-loved cat and that of any human child, "I would unhesitatingly choose the child". So would I. But suppose the child was a brain-dead, orphaned, terminally ill baby: is the choice so clear? There is another moral continuum here, and the vast majority of humans are at the top of it. But this is because of what they happen to be like, not because they are humans (what Rose calls "species loyalty"). At the other end, I have little difficulty with painlessly killing a prawn, whose sense of self is negligible, and no difficulty with killing a plant, which has none.
Rose makes much of the difficulty of drawing a line: "Where does the cut-off come? Primates? Mammals? Vertebrates? The moment one concedes that question, it is clear that the decision is arbitrary." There is a common logical fallacy at work here: the existence of a continuum does not obliterate distinctions. When does day become night? The exact twilight point you choose is "arbitrary", but that doesn't mean that day is the same as night. Likewise, the fact that, in the biological continuum between chimpanzees and ants, there is no clear cut-off point, doesn't mean that chimps and ants are worthy of the same moral concern.
I see no problem with a continuum of rights. What I do find objectionable is Rose's own arbitrary moral line, which he draws firmly under the human species. "Species loyalty" sounds fine, but what would we make of "race loyalty"? Calls on loyalty are really invitations to suspend rational thought. Rose (a committed anti-racist) thinks that to draw an analogy with black rights or women's rights is "profoundly offensive", because those rights were the result of
"struggles in which the oppressed themselves rise up to demand justice and equality", which animals can't do. The offensiveness bit is a rather feeble debating point: no-one is comparing women and blacks with animals. But Rose's conception of rights is equally odd: surely, the whole point is that rights exist independently of whether they are claimed. Did black people have rights before they claimed them? Of course. What about severely mentally handicapped adults? They can't "conceive or make such a claim", but I doubt if Professor Rose would deny them rights too.
Taking another tack, he writes that "the argument about how non-human animals should be treated is at root about how we as humans should behave ... we do not expect cats to debate the rights of mice. The issue is not really about animal rights at all, but about the duties we have just because we are human." This is just confused. To be sure, animals are not moral subjects — they don't have duties — but that has no bearing on whether they are moral objects — whether they have rights.
I believe that far from being the product of an "inchoate ideology", or a "romantic reaction to the seemingly cold rationality of science", it is the animal rights movement that has rationality on its side. The romantics are the scientists — still in the spell of a fantastic delusion that they have been granted dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth.