I would like to respond to Evan Leonard’s Wespeak, "Theoretical problems with animal testing." While he reminds us that some defenders of animal research conflate their personal goals (e.g., career) with the advancement of the human condition, I must disagree with his first "principle." The argument that an animal is an "object-as-a life" is far too simplistic and ignores the biology of the organisms involved. The level of intelligence, awareness, sentience, consciousness and so forth of different animals is not the same; to arbitrarily divise a cutoff does not make sense. For example, why Leonard would consider fish as a possible exception to "object-as-a-life" is unclear: fish are capable of complex behaviors. Does this imply that there could be different levels of sentience? 

Other organisms also suggest a gray zone. In the Sonoran desert (AZ), if you paint your lips bright red and lie still, hummingbirds will attempt to drink from your mouth, thinking (such as it is) that your mouth is a flower. I don’t doubt that these birds can feel pain, but I question equating the level of sentience of a hummingbird with that of a human; clearly, we differ from hummingbirds in our level of intelligence. Does this mean we should be cruel to hummingbirds? Of course not. Yet it suggests that if certain types of research (e.g., the biochemistry of pattern recognition) must be done with live animals, then this research should be done with birds, not humans. Rather than decrying all animal research, we must determine when the various objectives of animal research justify certain experimental techniques.

The fundamental problem with those who oppose all animal testing is that they appear to live in a world without gray zones. Two examples would help, as much of the debate in the
Argus regrettably has not dealt with specifics. First, a case where animal research is unjustified. An interesting question in microbiology is to what extent different variants of a single gene influence an organism’s fitness. One approach might be to examine growth on a particular sugar in a flask. An alternative might be to ask how genetic variation influences the ability of bacteria to kill a mouse. I would argue that given the stated goal, in this instance, there is no need to perform animal research; the flask experiments will yield an equally useful result. On the other hand, there are cases where animal research is justified.

My previous research studied non-traditional antibiotics which are effective against those Escherichia coli that cause bacillary diarrhoea. In the developing world, where drinking water is often contaminated, antibiotics are expensive, and refrigerating those antibiotics is impossible, these novel antibiotics might save lives (the WHO states that four million people, mostly infants and young children, die annually from untreated diarrhoea). We know that in a flask in the lab these antibiotics are effective, but they might not be effective in mammalian guts: gut digestive enzymes might degrade them, there are over 200 species of bacteria in the gut which might prevent the antibiotic-producing bacteria from surviving in the gut, antibiotic production is influenced by variability in the gut environment, etc. The only way to determine whether this therapy could work is to make mice (or baby chicks) very sick and see if this treatment cures them. 

Is this cruel to the mice? Yes. Yet we are faced with a choice: do we run preliminary trials on critically ill humans or on mice? Everything I know about vertebrate zoology and behavior leads me to the conclusion that even though mice experience pain, and might possess some amount of intelligence, sentience and consciousness, these abilities are not equal to those of a human. No mouse ever penned Auden’s "Christmas Oratio" or the Declaration of the Rights of Man (and I do not think the absence of an opposable thumb is the reason). If killing mice–and that is what is involved here–could save human life, then it is worth doing: if sentience and self-consciousness are used as guideposts, then we should realize that not all life, under certain circumstances, is equally "privileged" There are those gray zones, where simplistic classification (i.e., any level of sentience is equal to ours), fails us. The failure to recognize the relativistic nature of sentience and consciousness leads to a simplistic absolutism, where we absolve ourselves of difficult moral decisions. In doing so, we risk sacrificing our humanity.