Thought for the Day

For, as St. Francis of Assisi has told us, all the creatures of God’s hand are brethren. “My sisters the birds,” he was wont to say, “My brothers the kine in the meadows.” The essential of true justice is the sense of solidarity. All creatures, from highest to lowest, stand hand in hand before God. Nor shall we ever begin to spiritualise our lives and thoughts, to lighten and lift ourselves higher, until we recognise this solidarity, until we learn to look upon the creatures of God’s hand, not as mere subjects for hunting and butchery, for dissecting and experimentation, but as living souls with whom, as well as with the sons of men, God’s covenant is made.

Anna Kingsford, The Essence of True Justice, excerpted from Anna Kingsford and Edward Matiland: Addresses and Essays on Vegetarianism, 1912.

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An Important Development Hidden Underreported in the Media

The Grumpy Vegan wonders why this (“Flaws in use of animal tests for new drugs”) important development of research scientists using animals criticising the way in which animals are used didn’t receive the attention it should have. Surely, this isn’t anti-vivisection propaganda, is it?

The use of animal tests in drug development is fundamentally flawed, according to new evidence presented at the BA (British Association for the Advancement of Science) Festival of Science in York on Friday.

As a result, many animal studies “overstate how effective drugs really are”, said Malcolm Macleod, a consultant neurologist at Edinburgh university. These drug candidates then fail to work when given to humans in clinical trials – and could even put patients’ health at risk. The main issue is experimenters’ unconscious bias. Researchers do not routinely divide animals at random into treatment and control groups and, when they analyse results, they know which animals have been treated and which have not.

And the award to understatement goes to … Derek Fry, a senior Home Office animal inspector, and Simon Festing, head of the Research Defence Society

Those of us [who] defend animal research accept that there is a problem here.

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Thought for the Day

What’s wrong — fundamentally wrong — with the way animals are treated isn’t the details that vary from case to case. It’s the whole system. The forlornness of the veal calf is pathetic, heart wrenching; the pulsing pain of the chimp with electrodes planted deep in her brain is repulsive; the slow, tortuous death of the racoon caught in the leg-hold trap is agonizing. But what is wrong isn’t the pain, isn’t the suffering, isn’t the deprivation. These compound what’s wrong. Sometimes – often – they make it much, much worse. But they are not the fundamental wrong.

The fundamental wrong is the system that allows us to view animals as our resources, here for us — to be eaten, or surgically manipulated, or exploited for sport or money.

Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, in In Defense of Animals edited by Peter Singer.

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