Tim Matthews is one of my best friends, and also - coincidentally - one of the most controversial figures in contemporary forteana. He has been involved with the CFZ for nearly a decade now, raising eyebrows wherever he goes. This article on the Animal Rights Movement looks likely to be one of his most controversial postings yet.I was talking to an animal rights activist at an event in Manchester many years ago. It was supposed to be a protest against some supposed “Animal Auschwitz” as the organisers termed it but it ended up in a riot as the local police got stuck in to the front of the march after the militant types at the front tried to deviate from the planned route. As people were running in all directions it occurred to me that this was not getting anybody anywhere and the debate about so-called “animal rights” had turned into someone’s war against the establishment, the Police and society in general.
“We want a world where animals are able to roam free, where they have total liberty,” said the man in question, his snarling face and overall demenour suggesting that his claimed love for animals had been overtaken by a hatred for humankind. “Animal abusers” came in all shapes and sizes from, at the extreme end of the movement, “evil people” keeping pets, “scum” who ran zoos “for profit at the expense of animals” through to “animal abusers and modern day Nazi scientists” who did “Frankenstein type experiments on helpless animals so that rich women can look nice in their make up”. This sort of language was not, and is not, uncommon within the animal rights movement.
So why am I even writing about all this? Well, for several reasons the first of which is our love for animals. We understand their, and our, part in the overall scheme of things and we seek to balance the needs of people with animals with nature. As amateur naturalists we seek to protect and preserve not only rare species, but endangered species and also those whose habitat is threatened by climate change, the “need” to build new housing estates on green and brownfield sites and by the short-sightedness of industry and business that seeks profit at any cost.
There is clearly a balance to be worked out, between caring for animals and giving them respect within the natural order of things but not being blind to the fact that, since humans were primitive hunter gatherers, we have used and needed animals for food, for clothing and for survival. It is as natural for people to hunt animals as it is for them to care for and protect them. Yes, it is a conundrum and we certainly deal in shades of grey when it comes to our fractious relationship with the animal kingdom.
The problem with animal rights is that, one might argue, they have no rights at all. You might come to this conclusion based on your theory of their place in the world but you can get in serious trouble is you keep pets and fail to look after them properly. Many animals do, therefore, have legal protection and calls for their protection from abuse, ill treatment and also as experimental subjects date back until the mid 1800s at least. Indeed, the British Union Against Vivisection is at least 100 years old and has been at the forefront of campaigns against animals being used in experiments.
Back in the late 1970s my friends and I were walking around town one Saturday afternoon and came across an unusual stall featuring some awful pictures of animals in cages with their hair shaved off and all manner of similarly horrible graphic media. We’d never seen anything like it; an animal rights stall in the centre of a small, middle class, English market town! Radical stuff for sure but many of us signed the nice ladies petition against the evildoers back at the lab who were, they said, using animals to test make up, cigarettes and other products. A few weeks later, I remember receiving a letter from the company against whom we had made our collective complaint. Obviously they had taken the protest to heart, put the names and addresses of their petitioners on a database and sent them personalised letters. Obviously, even then, companies were very aware of the negative publicity directed towards them by the animal rights movement, then in its infancy.
It all seemed to obvious. Scientists were out of control, government regulation was failing and inadequate and, to cap it all we learned, posh people in traditional outfits were riding about the nearby countryside hunting down poor innocent foxes. You see, it was black and white. “We”, whomever we were, we right and they were wrong.
Things were not that simple and for many years, whilst occasionally reading an article about some action undertaken by animal rights militants, a protest against fox hunting or some news about the latest outrage involving animal experimentation, I took little interest and no part in any of it. It just wasn’t me and I’d rather have a fight at the football on a Saturday afternoon in any case!! That was my way of rebelling. Other young people were into the Punk/Crass and Animal Rights movement. They had their subculture and we had ours. Theirs was political, ours was subcultural!
Meanwhile, the militants got more militant and, throughout the 1980s, very few people within the scientific community were prepared, or able, to defend their work in terms of animal experiments. The arguments in favour of animal experiments and animal testing were lost, largely because most people believed that these experiments were to do with make-up and cigarettes, not with curing illness and similar research…
It got the stage where anyone involved in such research, no matter how marginally, could not be entirely sure of their personal safety, as a young generation of rebels (using animal rights as their platform to kick back against society in general encouraged by Anarcho-Punk propagandists and animal rights fanatics) became DIY terrorists and started to burn laboratories down, “rescue” animals and invade farms in “daylight inspection raids” where up to 200 militants would arrive at a premises break in, damage as much as they could and release animals in some cases into the wild!
This last type of action tended to suggest little knowledge of, and less care for, animals. Most of those animals released and, in their mind, “rescued from evil”, died in captivity as they simply couldn’t cope in the wild. Others, rescued and transported to networks of supporters ready to take in animals used in labs, would struggle with the moral burden of taking more and more animals and yet not being able to cope with them for reasons of time, space and cost.
One obvious example of the stupidity shown by members of the Animal Liberation Front was a raid on a mink farm in the 1990s where many mink wer set free, only to die a horrible death in the wild. (You might I suppose believe that this was better than ending up as an item of clothing, but that’s the whole point of introducing this subject.)
So, the ideology went, it was OK to “save” animals at the expense of humans and the DIY terrorists would happily cause millions of pounds of damage through improvised incendiary devices and small-scale bombs. The fact that, in nearly every case, people weren’t killed was more the result of luck than design and the intent to maim was clear despite propaganda to the contrary.
And what if the experiments will save your relative or friend? I suggest that this is perfectly moral. After all, the argument goes, animals are really here to serve us rather than the other way around…Many of us have personal experience of this debate. It’s therefore real, not theoretical. There is clear evidence that some animal testing has resulted in medicines that can help people cope and/or recover from serious and long term illness and disease:
A Royal Society report stated in 2006 that: “We have all benefited immensely from scientific research involving animals. From antibiotics and insulin to blood transfusions and treatments for cancer or HIV, virtually every medical achievement in the past century has depended directly or indirectly on research on animals.” (1)
I was surprised to discover, through a little research, that a number of high profile diseases had been cured or combated through animal testing and these include Penicillin, TB, Meningitis, Asthma Inhalers (that my daughter Freya uses), the Polio vaccine, Insulin for diabetes and many more.
The debate has now shifted; a group called Pro Test, created to speak out in favour of the Oxford Biomedical Facility, a new animal research unit, campaigned for the lab, for animal testing and, in its words, “the irrational arguments of anti Vivisectionists“. The bullying tactics of the animal rights extremists, carried on from experiences gained at high-profile protests against the Huntingdon Life Sciences Laboratory (and which had met with only mixed and occasionally effective Police/State action until a number of major enquiries and arrests several years ago) were seen to fail as thousands of highly intelligent students met the animal rights mafia head on - on the streets and in debate. The momentum has now shifted and a number of high profile scientists have put their weight behind Pro Test campaigning and these include Professor Robert Winston and The Royal College of Physicians.
I am tempted to suggest that the Countryside Alliance, that did so much to campaign against the current government’s outlawing of hunting with dogs, is but one part of a wider concern for the countryside, for tradition and for ecological balance. This is our constituency, just as those concerned about animal welfare should find a natural home with the Amateur Naturalists of the CFZ. So too should students at University likely to offer support to groups like Pro Test. These are all our people and we should try and get them on board because we are traditional, zoological and ecological.
In terms of foxes, yes they do attack farms and livestock and we cannot expect farmers to sit idly by whilst this happens. Do we need hunts? Well, even if you dislike the idea of the hunt, of the traditional English scene of the huntsman with his pack, you may rest assured that fox numbers are not affected by hunting because hunts are largely ineffective at catching them (!), that fox numbers will naturally replenish in short order and that, in any case, you are more likely to come across foxes in an urban environment than in the country, if recent evidence is anything to go by. (Every night you can see urban foxes here in Manchester. True scavengers, they operate with stealth and are a wonderful sight to see. They live locally and cause little if no harm to us..apart from the occasional ripped open binbag!!)
Animal rights extremism is the voice of yesterday’s failed militant but the moderate, thoughtful, considered and moderate Centre for Fortean Zoology, and the CFZ Alliance would seem to be the ideal vehicle for the concerned animal lover…..
(1) See, http://www.pro-test.org.uk/MAAR.pdf
18 months ago we started a magazine called Exotic Pets which did basically what it said on the tin, and covered ummmm exotic pets really. It has been a moderate success, but for a number of different reasons we have decided to knock it on the head.
Posts
