So, Who Honours
Animal Rights?
By Brian Sewell, Evening
Standard (News Extra)
Colin Blakemore,
eminent neuro-scientist and Professor of Physiology, is much in the news for
his omission from any recent honours list. He huffed, puffed, blamed the
Government for betraying him and threatened resignation as head of the Medical
Research Council, one of the bodies through which he influences it.
Lord Sainsbury, science
minister, then poured rather too thin an oil on this troubled water in a teacup
and his reassurances mollified neither Blakemore, nor the civil servants who
compile the lists, nor the professor's enemies in the animal rights fraternity.
We now know that honours are primarily given to those adept in the social
networking and drawing attention to themselves, but not to those who claim to
them is in anyway controversial.
Blakemore's work, we are led
to believe, is extremely controversial. British, European and American
recognition of his achievements demonstrates his distinction, but behind every
mention of neurobiology, brain injury, schizophrenia, psychobiology and
ophthalmology stands the spectre of vivisection and the whole field of
experiment on living, sentient and intelligent animals. Their intelligence may
be of a lower order than ours but their sentience must not be doubted.
Descartes, philosopher to
monarchs in the 17th century, thought animals mere machines, insentient, their
cries under his knife no more than the creaking of an axle without grease.
Those who still pursue vivisection for the sake of medicine, their
sensibilities to cruelty dulled by daily custom, stifle their consciences with
the argument that the animals they commit to pain-filled lingering deaths are
mere "laboratory tools". Let me, on behalf of these “laboratory
tools”, borrow Shylock's plea "...hath not a Jew... senses, affections,
passions?... If you prick us, do we not bleed?... if you poison us, do we not
die?"
In 1996, Tony Blair lent his
name to a paper, New Labour, New Life For
Animals, promising support for a Royal Commission on the justification for
experiments on animals. This promise, was, in principle, repeated in the
manifesto that led to his election as Prime Minister in 1997. Two years later,
however, we were told that such a commission would be ineffectual, cumbersome
and time-consuming, and in 2001 the authentic voice of Downing Street
unhesitatingly supported the laboratory work of Huntingdon Life Sciences, a
commercial firm increasingly notorious and thus beleaguered by protesters, a
firm the employees of which had been jailed for routine brutality to their
“laboratory tools”.
Lord Sainsbury, staunch
supporter of vivisection, then had the gall to argue that control over animal
experiments had never been more rigorous and diligent, and that, as every
single experiment was subject to licenses guaranteeing kindness and welfare as
well as necessity, no one concerned for the wellbeing of laboratory animals had
cause to worry.
This is the sophism invariably bandied about by the guilty men when the
validity of vivisection is under scrutiny. The scientists are always
enlightened, their opponents ignorant Luddites, foolishly sentimental in
attributing human response to inferior animals. We had heard it so often that
we no longer believe it. Our Misgivings require a proper response.
Vivisection is not a
particularly English scientific pursuit; it is happening all over the world and
one of the arguments repeated whenever its value is questioned in this country
is that if we do not carry out the experiments here, the scientists, the
science and the profit will go abroad.
In January 2002 Tony Blair
told the Royal Society that he had been in
As for supervision in this country,
it is in the matters of animal welfare that those who grudgingly accept the
need for vivisection are most sceptical - though electrodes in the brain are,
for some of us, not easy to reconcile with welfare.
From Home Office figures issued this year we learn that 2.73 million
experiments were carried out on animals. Many of these were, by their very
nature, multiple experiments, and 60 per cent of all procedures were conducted
without anaesthetics. No figures were issued for animals killed as surplus to
requirements, nor the number killed for body parts - killing is not
vivisection. Were the home office scrupulous in its compilation of statistics,
many more of us might be disturbed by the business of vivisection laboratories
- and business it is, for last year there wwas a 75 per cent increase in tests
for household products, and farms breed monkeys by the thousand for the profit
gained in supplying primates to laboratories. Breeding dogs and rabbits is
profitable business too - the use of dogs has risen by 3.3 per cent this year.
Every day I see the long scar
of the wound through which surgeons reached my heart, recognise how much I owe
the thousands of primates sawn asunder before such surgery could be done on me
and am grateful, but I wonder whether this is quite what God meant when, in
Genesis, he twice instructed man to have dominion over every other living
thing. We interpret dominion as absolute authority over animals to do with them
as we will, but dominion must surely involve moral responsibility too, for
otherwise it would still be legal to bait bears and badgers for amusement, to
beat our beasts of burden and torment our pets.
Had I had to confront every primate that suffered in refining the
technology of heart surgery, I would have refused the quadruple bypass that has
lengthened my life. Imagine the serried rank of them, the quantity of their
pain, terror and incomprehension, and put that in the balance against a few
more years for me.
Does Professor Blakemore
speak for all in the scientific establishment, or are others of his discipline
inclined to argue not against vivisection, but for it with a measure of
humanity ensuring that experiments on animals are kept to a bare minimum and
not wantonly multiplicated without number?
Are there some who go further and argue that the most reliable of
experiments for human benefit are those conducted on consenting humans? If so,
then these, perhaps, rather than Blakemore, deserve consideration for the
Honours List.