It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World!

The public majority would rightly be appalled by recent reports of the ‘execution’ of a dog, who was tied to a tree and then burnt alive. One doesn’t have to believe in the rights of animals to know that such an act of wanton cruelty is barbaric and that its perpetrator should swiftly be brought to justice.

To most animal rights campaigners, there is an unfathomable irony in the double standards that operate in this country with regard to animal cruelty laws. Outrage at the brutal and savage killing of a dog does not extend to other non-human animals who suffer terribly at the hands of researchers inside laboratories on a daily basis under the full sanction of the law. Indeed, the selfsame crime can be committed for the purposes of scientific research and be rewarded, not by a custodial sentence, but with a hefty grant, and even awards and accolades.

So when is a crime not a crime? How is it that what is considered criminal cruelty outside the laboratory is applauded when it takes place within a laboratory? The RSPCA officer investigating the execution of the dog said in his statement appealing for any information: “I simply can't comprehend what could motivate someone to inflict such appalling pain and suffering to a living creature”. Most compassionate individuals would agree.

Yet brutal as this incident was, scenes reminiscent of such torture are enacted in animal research laboratories the world over, and run into the millions in the UK alone, going unseen and unreported year after year. To the individual animal submitted to torture, suffering is suffering, brutality is brutality, no matter what label you give it. What’s worse is the fact that much of what animals are forced to undergo inside animal research laboratories can extend over months or years (as in the case of the ‘Oxford Two’, two primates who spent 15 years confined to a cage, and were subjected to repeated experiments that caused them severe and enduring pain).

Non-human animals are poisoned, burnt, brain damaged, caged and generally abused inside UK research laboratories every year. Every undercover investigation undertaken bears witness to these abuses as fact, but as long as they’re taking place under licence and the person inflicting that pain isn’t some psychotic yob, but a professor with a string of letters behind their name, then its sanctioned – apparently that has some bearing on the degree of suffering, which is obviously a great comfort to the victim.

We are reliably informed by the government and the institutions involved in this cruelty that the people involved in vivisection are “going about their lawful business”. While those that inflict suffering outside the research laboratory are reviled, those that do so within the law appear on our televisions at regular intervals and even acquire a sort of celebrity status, Colin Blakemore once of Oxford University being a case in point. Blakemore is now head of the Medical Research Council, a man whom the media love to elevate as a figure of great knowledge and compassion. His ‘glittering career’ and rise to stardom perfectly illustrate the double standards, which operate in this country with regard to animal cruelty and the law.

Blakemore began his work in the early 60’s, during which period he did not attempt to justify his research. As the animal rights movement grew in strength, he defended his bete noir status with assurances that the abuse of animals is a worthwhile occupation, and of benefit to human kind. He is – his admirers have stated – a man of artistic sensibility and modesty, with a hunger for knowledge. Research on sentient creatures was and still is often conducted out of a sense of curiosity, in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. In the spirit of this unholy ‘tradition’, Blakemore stated in one of his research papers that: “Philosophers and psychologists have pondered the question of how many animals interpret the direction of objects in space”. [1]

His desire to find an answer led him to operate on 5 felines: three kittens less than 3 weeks old, a kitten that had been kept in total darkness from birth until it was five and a half weeks old and a healthy adult cat. In each feline, he cut the muscles that control the eyeball and rotated it, then several weeks later he cut off the animals’ whiskers, as he felt they assisted the animals’ orientation. His ‘groundbreaking’ observation deduced from this research was that the animals could not place objects in space as well with a rotated eyeball. To one of such ‘highbrow’ status as Blakemore, the common sense that would lead any sensible layperson to make the selfsame deduction (without resorting to injuring and killing sentient creatures) was not enough. He had to PROVE it. Not content with rotating eyeballs, Blakemore went on to stitch up tiny kittens’ eyes and reared the animals in total darkness for weeks. Most of his work has subsequently been rubbished by medically qualified people such as Dr. Louis Goldman and the late Dr. Kit Pedlar, himself an eye specialist, who questioned the relevance of such brutal research.

It is impossible to estimate just how many kittens have been used in visual deprivation experiments since the early 1960s. In 1981 [2], researchers at Oxford University decided they would go one better and sew up the eyelids of young monkeys. Young monkeys first had one eye sewn up, then unstitched and then the other eye sewn up; others were kept in total darkness. At other institutes such as St Thomas’s Hospital, other blinding variations were practiced and substances were dripped into kittens’ eyes. The visually deprived kittens were then forced to walk a narrow experimental stairwell and noxious stimuli were applied if it was felt that the animal may have feigned blindness [3].

And there but for the grace of providence might any number of our companion animals have ended up, for that is the reality. What’s the difference between the domestic “pet” and laboratory animal? Does your companion cat, dog or rabbit, feel more pain just because it’s your “pet” and you lavish it with love? Does the nameless dog tied to a tree feel more pain while it burns to death because it happens outside a research laboratory? The animals imprisoned inside vivisection laboratories may be enslaved, but they have an identical capacity to think, and dream and feel pain and that makes every act of cruelty that is inflicted upon them criminal, whether or not it is legally sanctioned. Vivisectors can eulogise on their achievements and play to a captive crowd about their alleged victim status but there is one essential and inescapable truth: they are not victims. The real victims are the countless animals that have suffered and died, are suffering and dying, and are destined to suffer and die “for the greater good”.

Before you condemn outright those who believe in animal rights, the next time you take ‘your’ dog for a walk and watch him run for the sheer joy of it, or the next time ‘your’ cat sits purring contentedly on your lap, spare a thought for the cat, dog, or rabbit - just like the one you have at home – alone, cowering in pain in the corner of a laboratory cage in a research lab near you. It doesn’t require a huge leap of imagination to substitute the face of an anonymous animal with that of a much loved “pet”. These are the only real victims and their abusers are many: in government, universities, newspapers, security companies, building contractors – from the top rung of the ladder to the bottom – their collusion ensures that the mad, mad world of vivisection stays firmly on the map. To greater or lesser degrees - and it is only a matter of degree - they are as criminal as the person who, earlier this month, set fire to a dog and watched him burn to death.

References:

1. Nature 16th October 1975

2. Brain Research 1981-229

3. Metabolic Ophthalmology 1978 Volume 2

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