Muddlers beware:
The case for philosophical extremism
Empty Cages: Facing the Challenge of Animal Rights
Author: Tom Regan; Foreward by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Lanham, MD 2004. 229 pps. $21.95 ISBN
0-7425-3352-2
Review by Robert Speth, PhD
Review summary
The initial critical review of the book encompassed 12 pages. For purposes
of presentation and discussion, I have summarized it into a more traditional
review. In addition however, I present a critical review of specific aspects
of Regan's philosophical principle, focusing primarily around Regan's challenge
to the use of animals in biomedical research in Chapter 10. Comments in parentheses
are restatements or corrections of the author's comments by the reviewer. Those
in square brackets are those of the author to provide the proper context.
Regan's argues that larger cages (i.e., welfare without freedom) is not enough.
The exploitation (i.e., domestication) of animals to serve any human needs and
wants is forbidden. There can be no caged, or otherwise constrained animals.
Regan gives us a travelog of his journey from meat eater to ethical vegan,
noting along the way his philosophic rationale for so-doing. He then attempts
to tie animal rights with human rights - unsuccessfully so in this reviewer's
opinion.
A major part of the book vilifies commercial and biomedical animal enterprises,
most of these being retreaded arguments of animal rights advocates (ARAs) starting
with an HBO shockumentary on the fate of a cat in a restaurant in China. However,
the biased and inaccurate portrayal of animal research (Chapter 10) is so egregious
as to question Regan's entire treatise. It appears that bio-logic is excluded
from Regan's philosophical realm.
While there is little novelty in the book, there are two noteworthy developments.
Regan assumes a defensive posture, perceiving that the animal rights movement
has lost its luster. This decline arises from the stereotyped image of "unbalanced
bunny huggers," "we hate humans," "extremists," and "terrorists" that now haunts
the movement because these are the ARAs who attract most of the media attention.
He begs "My hope is that people will not let the self-righteousness, tastelessness,
or violence of a small handful of ARA's prevent them from becoming ARAs themselves."
(page 6)
Regan also sees spokesmen for commercial animal interests and biomedical research
and the support of the American Veterinary Medical Association making inroads
into the previously unchallenged moral high ground of animal rights. Even the
fur industry is able to penetrate this self-righteousness. His response is to
insinuate that they are liars and hypocrites whose money has corrupted the "paid
pipers" (page 14) of the media.
The other novelty is Regan's portrayal of a mystical, almost spiritual animas
between humans and animals. Starting with a giftedness in children, the "DaVincians"
who possess "animal consciousness," and an analogy with a Bible story "Damascans,"
he brings us to modern day "Muddlers." Muddlers are people who exist along the
continuum ranging from clueless about animal rights to those (like himself)
who have attained full enlightenment. For those who enjoy such writing, I recommend
that of J.K. Rowling. Wizards, witches and muggles are much more entertaining
than DaVincians, Damascans and Muddlers, and there is no pretense of factuality
in the Harry Potter books.
Ultimately the book, like its many predecessors advocating animal rightism,
fails because it is unable to effectively and truthfully argue a compelling
case for animal rights. Animals are not things, but they are not human. As long
as the animal rights movement continues to have an either/or mentality which
precludes the assignment of an intermediate place for animals in the hierarchy
of the world, their efforts to establish the principle of rights for animals
will continue to fail.
Critical review
The Foreword is foreboding because the writer acknowledges jeopardizing the
safety of his children to adhere to his animal rights convictions by refusing
to buy the safest available car (it had leather seats). This effectively torpedoes
Regan's considerable efforts to align human and animal rights as a conjoint
effort in this book. However, in view of Regan's oft-stated opposition to animal
research "Even if it were true that humans reap great benefits and bear no harms
from the practice [vivisection], that would not justify violating the rights
of the animals whose misfortune it is to find themselves in a cage in some laboratory
somewhere." (page 177), even Regan contradicts his argument that animal rights
and human rights go hand in hand.
Four abolitions
In "Normal Rockwell Americans" Regan restates his four abolitions against the
use of animals by humans. Not for food, not for fiber, not for entertainment,
and not for scientific research (page 10). Interestingly Regan (a pet owner)
never mentions companionship among his abolitions even though this fits within
the domain of entertainment. Of note, the words pet, pet-owner, and companion
animal are not in the Index. Also missing from Regan's (the ethical vegan) treatise
is the mention of the killing of animals by food and fiber crop farmers. Interestingly,
Steven Davis, a researcher at Oregon State University has presented data indicating
that vegetarianism causes more animal deaths than meat eating. So, if Regan
wishes to minimize the adverse impact he is having on animal populations (aside
from becoming a fruitarian and wearing a fig leaf) he should become an ethical
meat-eater, like in the picture of the Thanksgiving Day dinner shown in Norman
Rockwell's famous Saturday Evening Post cover.
While Regan claims to repudiate animal rights extremism he lauds the ALF and
continues to rely upon PETA-supplied information and quotes from other militants
in the movement. He even borrows from Peter Singer's philosophy, equating speciesism
to sexism, attempting to paint animal rights extremists as being no different
from opponents of rape. Stepping outside of Regan's self-imposed limits on logical
thought, this reviewer sees extremist animal rightism, upon which Regan relies,
as being the same as accusing all men of rape simply because some men commit
rape.
A futile attempt
Knowing that one of the major criticisms of the animal rights movement is that
it compromises human rights, Regan makes a futile attempt to establish himself
as a human rights advocate in Part II: Moral Rights: What They Are and Why They
Matter, Chapter 3: Human Rights. His poorly chosen tactic is to bemoan the Tuskegee
Syphilis Study. Perhaps due to his efforts to abstract the story within one
page, he omits critical components. This study was initiated to treat these
men with arsphenamine to cure their syphilis (Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis
Experiment, James H. Jones, The Free Press, New York; New and Expanded Edition,
1993). It was only after the stock market crash of 1929, which depleted the
assets of the organization funding the study, that the treatment was stopped.
In addition, penicillin, shown to be an effective antibiotic in Florey's Nobel
Prize-winning studies of mice infected with streptococcus in 1940 and effective
against syphilis in 1943 was withheld from the men because of an ill-defined
danger known as the Herxheimer reaction (The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics,
Louis Goodman & Alfred Gilman, Editors, 2nd Ed. 1955, page 1237). This
Clearly Regan's animal rights principle: 'Humans have no right to the knowledge
gained from research on animals' infringes upon human rights. The gospel according
to Regan, which would have prevented Florey's studies of penicillin in mice,
might have forever denied the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis study the very
drug that he condemns the US Government of withholding from these men for 30
years. Regan's exclusion of such bio-logic from his philosophical treatise is
its downfall.
This example reveals another striking omission in this book: the lack of comment
on the morality of using drugs developed through 'immoral' animal research.
Undaunted by such concerns, Regan progresses insidiously towards his goal of
equating the plight of The Tuskegee Syphilis Study victims of with that of animals.
Regan uses Darwinian evolution, which conceptually (if not practically) supports
his equivocation of humans with other animals. Having invoked Darwin however,
Regan realizes that he has begun to slide down the slippery slope that disappears
into a taxonomical ooze that rivals Joel Chandler Harris' tar baby. Regan's
solution is shockingly simplistic. It is in essence a 'see no evil, hear no
evil, do no evil' approach. Despite the fact that he considers a nervous system
to be the critical attribute that makes an animal "a subject-of-a-life" he draws
the line in the neighborhood of fish. He simply ignores the fact that reptiles,
mollusks, insects and a host of other less than cuddly species are sentient
and should, under his philosophical principle, be entitled to the same protections
he asserts for cats, dogs and chickens. Regan the philosopher becomes Regan
the tactician, omitting mention of the flaw that invalidates, or at the very
least, ruins the palatability of his philosophy.
Regan sinks even lower, resurrecting one of the most squalid principles that
the animal rights philosophy has ever proffered: being human is not morally
relevant because differences in race and gender are the same as differences
in species (more parroting of Peter Singer). Once again, Regan does not allow
bio-logic to interfere with his efforts to dehumanize us down to the level of
fish.
The attack on biomedical research
In Part IV: The Metamorphoses, Regan attacks animal agriculture, hunting, trapping,
fishing , the use of animals for entertainment, and the use of animals in biomedical
research. Refutation of all of Regan's erroneous arguments against the uses
of animals for these purposes requires far more pages than are available in
this forum, so I will focus only upon the invalidity of Regan's challenge to
biomedical research using animals.
Regan attempts to negate the value of animal testing as a means of preventing
toxic substances from causing adverse effects in humans and animals. That scores
of animals in toxicity tests can reveal toxicity leading to the protection of
hundreds of thousands of humans and other animals from such ill effects cannot
logically be challenged. The fact that in vitro tests might have a better predictive
rate than in vivo tests (as claimed by Regan's references), does not preclude
the likelihood that the conduct of both the in vitro and in vivo tests would
be an even better predictor of toxicity than either venue alone.
Regan cites a listing of animal research prepared by another ARA on page 171.
Not surprisingly, it omits positive mentions of research to determine the mechanisms
of disease, to develop animal models of diseases, to develop and study novel
therapeutic treatments for disease, and to study emerging diseases. Regan is
long on his depictions of the horrors of the fate of animals in laboratories
as well as in agricultural and entertainment settings, but he ignores the far
worse plights of the wild cousins of these animals. Once again Regan takes an
'out-of-sight, out-of-mind' approach to arguments that refute his animal rights
philosophy and show its disharmony with animal welfare.
In the section entitled "The (Some But Not All) Animal Welfare Act," Regan
infers that the government was hypocritical in not including rats mice and birds
in the Act. If indeed Regan wishes to unhypocritically argue based on the term
animal, then he should be arguing for the inclusion of the entire animal kingdom
in the Animal Welfare Act.
Regan's inference that variations in Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee
reviews between committees indicates inadequate animal care (page 174) is ludicrous.
Each IACUC has its own personality and different committees differ on what they
consider to be adequate safeguards. Would Regan similarly challenge Christian
beliefs based on the different practices of Christian religions?
With regard to the benefits of animal research, Regan superficially accepts
the validity of animal research as having provided many cures for disease as
a prelude to attacking it. First, he trots out his moral principle that we have
no right to be obtaining that knowledge because the animals that provide this
knowledge do not receive any benefit from the knowledge. Then, in the section
"Overestimation of Benefits" on page 175, Regan repeats an infamous lie of the
animal rights mantra: "the vast majority of the most important health advances
have resulted from improvements in living conditions (in sanitation for example)
and changes in personal hygiene and lifestyle, none of which have anything to
do with animal experimentation." Recognition of the need for sanitation and
hygiene did not occur until Louis Pasteur proved the germ theory of disease,
showing how infectious diseases are transmitted from one animal to another.
Until that time many still argued that disease producing microorganisms arose
from spontaneous generation. This knowledge of transmissibility of disease,
derived from animal research, is what led to improved sanitation! Had Regan's
proscription against animal research been in place in Pasteur's day we might
still think that disease-causing germs arise spontaneously and still might not
have a clue about the importance of sanitation.
It is noteworthy that according to Rene Vallery-Radot (The Life of Pasteur,
Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City, NY, 1927, p. 334) British anti-vivisectionists
wrote torrents of hate mail to Pasteur: " – letters full of threats, insults
and maledictions, devoting him to eternal torments for having multiplied his
crimes on the hens, guinea pigs, dogs and sheep of the laboratory." John Crellin
(Antibiosis in the nineteenth century, in: The History of Antibiotics,
John Parascandola, Ed., American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, Madison,
WI, 1980, pp. 5-13) describes it as, "... anti-vivisectionist attacks upon Louis
Pasteur and his rabies vaccine became almost a monomania in Britain. Using Regan's
poorly chosen bridge game analogy from this book, with respect to Pasteur, bio-logic
trumped philosophical extremism.
In the section Underestimation of Harms, Regan delves deeper into dishonesty
by reincarnating another animal rightist misrepresentation, 'that development
of new drugs through animal research causes human deaths.' As already noted,
the discovery of penicillin's antibiotic efficacy (which Regan trumpets as the
drug that saved the Tuskegee Syphilis Study victims in Chapter Three) arose
from an experiment using just eight mice. I challenge Regan to provide documentation
of "...the hundreds of millions of deaths and the uncounted illnesses and disabilities
that are attributable to reliance on the 'animal model' in research."
Using clever wordsmithing Regan makes it appear that every adverse drug reaction
in humans is attributable to the failure of animal research to prevent toxic
drugs from being administered to humans. This misrepresentation of animal research
borders upon sociopathy because of the potential adverse health effects that
could arise if such statements led to the abolition of animal testing of drugs.
What Regan does not tell you is that a substantial proportion of the adverse
effects of prescription drugs arise from medication errors. He also refrains
from mentioning that many other adverse effects of prescription drugs arise
from interaction with other drugs or herbal medications taken concurrently by
patients. Such potential interactions are not tested for under current FDA requirements
for demonstrating drug safety but are monitored as part of Phase IV testing
of new drugs in human patients. Indeed the bio-logical inference of Regan's
complaint that prescription drugs cause too much human toxicity is that more
animal testing should be done to examine for potentially adverse interactions
with other drugs that patients might reasonably be expected to be taking concurrently
with the new drug!
Regan also fails to convey to his readers how many potentially toxic drugs
never reach the human population because animal testing reveals them to be toxic.
In what might be the most celebrated example of the marketing of a drug without
adequate animal testing, thalidomide caused thousands of cases of phocomelia
– a disease in which limb development is grossly impaired – in children
born to mothers taking this drug for morning sickness during pregnancy. After
the drug was taken off the market, it was subsequently tested for teratogenicity
– the ability to cause birth defects – in pregnant animals and was
found to cause phocomelia in their offspring. Had thalidomide been tested on
pregnant animals prior to its marketing to humans, this disaster would not have
occurred!
Near the beginning of this part of the book, Regan attempts to denigrate the
use of leather. One of his strategies is to attack Indian leather because of
the deplorable conditions of cattle in India. Once again he shoots himself in
the foot. As sacred animals, cattle are for all practical purposes 'liberated'
in all but two Indian states. There are estimated to be 200 million cattle in
India. It is little wonder that cattle struggle to survive under conditions
in which there are no owners responsible for their care and that communities
attempt to rid themselves of these animals when their debilitation presents
a nuisance. So here we have a pretty good laboratory demonstration of the implementation
of the principles espoused by Regan (as well as by PETA, whose operatives documented
these deplorable conditions). And, it shows the dismal outcome for the animals
upon whom liberty has been inflicted. Rights? Yes! Welfare? No!
Critical review epilogue
Readers of this review may question whether it is unnecessarily harsh toward
Regan's philosophy and goals. The intention of this review was to evaluate and
critique the philosophical principles proposed by and argued for by Dr. Regan
in support of the animal rights movement. However, I discovered that the most
of the evidence in support of his philosophy was either missing, inaccurate,
derived erroneously or was grossly deficient in objective evaluation. It then
became incumbent for me to report that the 'logic' of Regan's 'philosophy' is
nothing of the sort. Logic cannot be based on falsehoods, ignorance and one-sided
arguments. Regan's continued defiance of the bio-logic is what causes his treatise
to sink to the subterranean realm occupied by consorts such as the Flat Earth
Society, the creation science movement, and the ban dihydrogen monoxide (also
known as water) movement.
Masson's Foreword speaks of animals being happiest when they do what they have
evolved to do. Humans evolved in an ecosystem in which we, like every other
species on this planet, exploit other species. But Regan tells us humans can't
be what we evolved to be. Worse yet, if his principles were established, we
would be prohibited from pursuing the very activities needed to sustain human
life on this planet. I argue that a 'moral principle' that dooms humanity to
extinction is neither moral nor ethical.
Robert Speth, Ph.D. Board Member of NAIA, is Professor and Chair of the
Department of Pharmacology in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Mississippi.
He is also Adjunct Professor of Pharmacology and Neuroscience at College of
Veterinary Medicine at Washington State University and Adjunct Professor of
Physiology and Pharmacology at Oregon Health Sciences University. He is also
a charter member and Past-President of the Society for Veterinary Medical Ethics.
|
