Matthew Parris
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So I surprised myself by my reaction to a reader’s letter to the paper on the following morning. ‘Anyone reading your coverage of the ban by many ferry operators and airlines on the transport of animals for experiments would think that there is only one position that right-thinking people can take on this issue.’ Our correspondent went on to complain that not a word had been heard on behalf of those who have ‘well-founded ethical reservations about animal experiments’. Some three million animals die in British laboratories every year, he wrote, often after hideous suffering. There were two sides to this argument. And with that too I found myself nodding in sympathy. How odd. I support animal testing.
Are those two apparently opposite responses reconcilable? It’s doubtful. Yet are they not both valuable? I think so. And thinking more I had to conclude that though I’ve argued against extremism at every step of the way, the net result — I stress the word ‘net’ — of decades of fierce campaigning against vivisection is almost certainly positive. Britain today would be a crueller place without it.
Half a century ago there were almost no practical limits on vivisection. I remember as a schoolboy how in our biology labs we all pulled living frogs to pieces to study their organs — without being troubled by the morality of it. Acids were thrown routinely into animals’ eyes for the cosmetic industry’s benefit. Beagles in cages were forced to smoke. Nobody seemed to care. Such practices were indicative of an era when it seemed anyone calling themselves a scientist could do almost anything they liked in the name of science: the era, too, when remote, beautiful and ecologically precious islands were being blown to pieces for nuclear testing — and to most of us it didn’t seem to be an issue.
Then came the brigade of antis. They were obsessive. They were unreasoning. They seemed deaf to argument. Many of them were unprepared to compromise or seek any kind of middle ground. Typically, they were against all animal testing. In this blanket rejection of vivisection, in my view, they didn’t have a leg to stand on then, and they don’t now.
But by their single-mindedness and their fury they brought to public attention practices that when forced to think about it the public didn’t like. Scientists and legislators were shamed into asking more carefully what was necessary. The scope of acceptable animal testing has been more strictly defined, customers have learned to prefer cosmetics that don’t involve such practices, and manufacturers have learned how to develop them. The purists haven’t really achieved their aim, yet surely they have done much good.
In Spain my sister, Deborah, and her Catalan husband, Manel, have helped lead an anti-animal cruelty party — even stood for election, and draped themselves naked over stone slabs in a Barcelona square in a mass protest — and campaigned ferociously for years for a total ban on bull-fighting. I dislike bull-fighting but hope that changing public opinion rather than legislation will gradually end the culture. We seek the same outcome, but only my sister has devoted her life to this campaign. She feels more strongly and I can’t escape the conclusion that it’s the very force of her conviction that has impelled her to the extremity of her conclusion. With Debs you get the whole package: you can’t say ‘yes to the passion, but please moderate the aims’.
All my life I’ve tried to believe that balanced and moderate arguments could be advanced forcefully and effectively, sidelining the extremists. But I’ve come now to believe that the argument is usually defined by its outliers, even if its conclusion is finally framed by the mainstream. You have to have the outliers. You have to have the women suffragettes prepared to break the law and throw themselves under carriages. You have to have the Peter Tatchells grabbing headlines with caricatured versions of gay rights. Like a great ocean liner, the bulk of mankind has to have the dogged, single-minded energy of the tugboats pulling at right angles to where she’s going, apparently making no impression, yet finally altering her course.
Three cheers, then, for the anti-vivisectionists. Three cheers for responsible animal experimentation. And two cheers for a compromise between them both.
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