Posts Tagged ‘animal rights’

Last week, the 2012 Grand National took place.

Two horses died – According To Pete and former favourite Synchronised were both put down after taking nasty falls during the race. Despite attempts to reduce the danger, such incidents aren’t a surprise. Indeed, it’s more of a surprise when we get through a Grand National without any horses losing their life.

Take a look at the list on Wikipedia. Two this year, two last year, a total of 11 over the past decade – and this is just from one race! Open it up to wider events and we see the same trend – this year’s Cheltenham Festival saw no less than five horses put down.

No wonder people are starting to question whether there is a future for horse racing.

The May meeting of the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire was a talk by a representative from the animal rights group Uncaged on the subject of animal experimentation. Unfortunately the speaker didn’t actually show up, but we had a fantastic debate on the subject anyway, with opinions being very much divided.

I’m not sure what side of the line I fall, though on the strength of the arguments I think Gijsbert delivered a powerful argument in favour of animal experimentation. It could have been different if someone as eloquent had been there to argue against it, unfortunately most of the arguments but forward by that side were just rubbish.

The biggest problem was that the anti-animal experimentation side used an endless amount of bad arguments and logical fallacies, of which Gijsbert quickly called them on. These included:

• The slippery slope argument and constantly envoking Godwin’s Law.
• Claims that we shouldn’t care if humans die, “so what,” which is fine, but you then can’t argue that we should care about animals. If you say it’s just natural for humans to die, you can also argue that it’s natural for one species to use another for it’s own ends.
• Some people abuse animals and do horrible things to them, so all animal experimentation is bad. It’s true that some animals are treated horrifically, but of course, it doesn’t follow that this makes all animal treatment inherently bad.
• “We’re against ALL animal experimentation. Except humans.”
• Uninformed opinions about the regulations surrounding the issues.
• “You shouldn’t take into consideration how intelligent an animal is. Pain is pain, no matter how intelligent a creature is. Except for insects, it’s fine to kill them.”
• “I saw this on a video many years ago.”
• “If you carry out Kosher slaughter correctly the animal feels no pain, whereas if you don’t pre-stun the animal correctly it suffers horribly.”

There are some great arguments against animal experimentation and it’s a shame that certain voices making comments such as those above, drowned out the few logical arguments that were put forward against animal experimentation.