|
|
|
An Ethical Tradition at Oxford A selection of quotations from distinguished Oxford University people spanning a period of 250 years, from1758 to 2008, and expressing concern, sorrow, and indignation over the exploitation of animals in science. "What specific benefits were expected to result from these tests -experiments - whatever you call them?"
The tide is turning fast against those who still cling on to the view
that experimentation and testing of drugs on animals is valid and necessary.
VERO is one of the brave organisations which have successfully challenged
this outdated orthodoxy.
Once we acknowledge life and sentience in other animals, we are bound to
acknowledge what follows, their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness.
It is in the name of science, and with the specious bribe of release from
all our ills, that we have been cajoled and threatened and insulted into
permitting the continued torture of our kindred and the continued blunting
of the sensibilities of those who come to work in laboratories. Let no-one
rely on common decency in such a situation: the pressure of one's
professional peer-group, the atmosphere of dismissive tolerance of all
outside the clan, the calm assumption that this is what we do, are all far
too strong for most of us to resist.
Who, not a vivisector, can read without a shudder these papers in the
Nineteenth Century, and Mr Simon's address to the Medical Congress in 1881,
a shudder at the utter and absolute indifference displayed to the terrible
and widespread suffering which the practice the writers are defending
entails upon helpless and harmless creatures? Yet who are these writers?
Chosen men; bright examples (we are told) of the scientific class, persons
whose names alone are to be arguments in their favour. If these men write
thus, and it is incredible that merely as men of common sense they should
affect an indifference they do not feel, what will be the temper of mind of
the ordinary coarse, rough man, the common human being, neither better nor
worse than his neighbours, of whom the bulk of the medical profession, like
the bulk of every other profession, is made up?
Our conviction, for reasons we have given, is that we require now to
extend the great principles of liberty, equality and fraternity to the lives
of animals. Let animal slavery join human slavery in the graveyard of the
past!
We have now, I think, seen good reason to suspect that the principle of
selfishness lies at the root of this accursed practice.
There is nothing to indicate that an animal values its life any less than
a human being values his.
It is time that universal resentment should arise against these horrid
operations.
I heartily wish success to your endeavour to keep an evil thing out of
Oxford.
The university could do so much more to develop, implement and promote
non-animal alternatives. There is growing sensitivity on this issue. It
would be good to have a rational debate, concentrating on alternatives; and
even better for the university to end up on what many regard as the ethical
side.
Nothing can justify, no claim of science, no conjectural result, no hope
for discovery, such horrors as these.
The promoters of the memorial sincerely trust that they will not be
suspected of any desire to hinder physiological teaching or research in the
University: they are only anxious that physiology, like other branches of
science, should be pursued by means free from reproach.
People in general are even now only beginning to see what Lawrence and
Bentham saw long ago, that animals have the same natural rights of life and
liberty as ourselves, and for the same reason - that these rights are the
necessary outcome of a capacity to feel pleasure and pain - and that
violations of these rights (from the killing of a cobra to the killing of an
ox for food) cannot be justified unless they are conditioned by 'the
struggle for existence'.
The passing of this Cruelty to Animals Bill [ie. the first vivisection
act, 1876] is a great step in the history of mankind.
My resignation was placed in the Vice-Chancellor's hands on the Monday
following the vote endowing vivisection in the University, solely in
consequence of that vote
We are in the midst of an emergency in which appalling suffering is being
inflicted on millions of animals for purposes that on any impartial view are
obviously inadequate to justify the suffering.
Very often, people are inclined to be dismissive about the importance of
animal welfare and say that we should attend to other priorities. They think
that concern for animals is based on misplaced anthropomorphism or sheer
sentimentality, whereas I believe that how we treat our animals is a measure
of society.
The animal rights brigade ask deep questions which I for one have not
seen answered yet by the defenders of vivisection and torture of animals in
laboratories.
When all the arguments are over, if one has not been convinced by the
weight of reason, one's nightmares and day-dreams should still be filled, if
one's actual experience is not, with the vision of countless other animals
dying and dead in the misconceived interests of man.
|