Animal Rights Activists Offer Reward for Arrest of Researchers
There is an ongoing harassment and intimidation campaign to intimidate UCLA scientists away from conducting medical research with primates. One researcher has already been scared off. Another had an incendiary device left on his doorstep, which may have accidentally been left at the wrong house. Happily, it didn't go off but the death to the researcher and his family was unmistakable. The FBI has offered a reward for the arrest and conviction of these criminals.
Now, as if to establish some sick moral equivalence between terrorist activity and legal and necessary animal research, liberationists are offering a reward for the arrest of researchers for animal cruelty.
When you toss aside human exceptionalism, as the animal liberationist movement does, you lose your moral compass. But society needs to support these scientists and protect them from harm. Researchers are not criminals and liberation terrorists are not so many modern-day Wilberforces.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:46 PM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
If an average citizen without a Ph.D subjected a primate to the same experiments as the scientists at UCLA they would be charged with animal cruelty. I think that you are passing over the very obvious double standard that allows the use of animals in scientific experiments to continue.
Thanks for writing, Paul. First, this post is about not granting human-style personhood to an animal. Beyond that, the "double standard," as you call it, is highly warranted. Medical research with animals isn't done to be cruel or to cause pain and suffering--as would be the case in your example of an average person engaging in experiments. It is done by trained professionals to derive--as it has--tremeondous human (and animal) benefit. Indeed, such experimentation is required by the Nuremberg Code since at some point we need to use living organisms in research, and often, this requires animals with relatively simlar makeup. The only other option would be to use disabled human beings, which would violate human rights.
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