When the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science meets next week, October 15-19, in Salt Lake City, the animal rights movement will be on the 4,000 expected attendees’ minds. An article previewing the meeting in the October 2006 issue of The Scientist quotes B. Taylor Bennett, associate vice chancellor for research at the University at Chicago, saying: “There is a movement afoot to give legal standing to animals. The activists are trying to equate racism, sexism, and speciesism.” (The Wikipedia defines speciesism as “a prejudice against taking the interests of members of other species into account or not giving other species their due based simply on the fact that they belong to another species.”)
To Mr. Bennett, vivisection is profitable to the human race, and therefore it is justified. Conversely to Mr. Bennett, if vivisection is curtailed, its profit to the human race will be curtailed, which is unjustified.
Mark Twain had his answer to Mr. Bennett’s profit worries. He put it in a letter to the secretary of the London Anti-Vivisection Society, May 26, 1899:
I believe I am not interested to know whether Vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn’t. To know that the results are profitable to the race would not remove my hostility to it. The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity towards it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.
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For a brief biography of Mark Twain, click here.
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