Confessions of a vegetarian vivisector

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Confessions of a vegetarian vivisector : I won't eat animals, but I'll happily slice them up in the name of medical science.

Sophie Petit-Zeman



August 7, 2006


Why did I become a vegetarian vivisector? The answer seems so obvious it amazes me it's not a more popular lifestyle choice. Though admittedly it's not one most people have to make.

I can survive perfectly well without eating meat (and so can you) but we can't get far alleviating illness and disease without research using animals. Someone's got to do it, and when I was, I stopped wanting to eat flesh after handling it all day in the lab.

This pragmatic stimulus came more than twenty years ago when I was researching pain, stroke and epilepsy using rats, gerbils, and occasionally - and yes, it felt harder to do, but no, I don't feel differently about the justification - cats.

One evening, home, tired and hungry, I pulled some bacon out of the fridge and realised I didn't have the faintest desire to eat it. The moral question followed: "If I don't need to eat you to live, why kill you for food?" And soon I had two reasons for going veggie: meat was too mixed up with the day job of forceps and formalin to leave me keen on having it for supper, and I couldn't justify the loss of that animal's life by arguing it was necessary for my survival. So unlike vivisection.

Give me some cheese and a tomato and I'll happily call it lunch, but don't give me the anti-vivisectionists' woolly talk of cell cultures and computer simulations and call them viable alternatives to using animals. Not unless you can show me exactly how they'll cure cancer, unravel the anguish of Alzheimer's disease or guide the surgeon's knife when he does my heart transplant. Or indeed, your child's heart transplant.

The moral argument against eating meat has stuck with me since I stopped doing lab work, yet many of my best friends are meat-eating vivisectors. That's fine by me if it's fine by them - we all have our own cut-off points. The problem with the anti-vivisectionists is that their cut off point - the conviction that using animals in medical research is wrong - is both a luxury, and hypocritical.

It's a luxury because we need to understand and figure out how to cure disease. I'd love to devote my days to saving animals from harm or suffering, but it's more pressing to alleviate that of humans - and let's not forget vivisection helps animals long-term, too. And it's hypocritical because anti-vivs benefit all the time from medical advances that have used animals, just like the rest of us.

If people notice me avoiding meat and ask why, and I explain how it began, they sometimes simply don't understand. And while I may puzzle carnivore hosts, it puzzles me that anti-vivisectionists are obsessed with the 3 million animals used for research each year set against the 1,000 million killed for food. I can defend using animals in medical research without having anything to compare it with, but seeing the ways of working of bits of the food industry, and its scale and fundamental futility, does make me wonder why those concerned about animals choose the vivisection battle.

I disliked using animals in research, but dislike far more the thought of anyone I love suffering because we didn't allow the sacrifice of a relatively tiny number of animals. Research that uses them, as few as possible, done well, and hand-in-hand with the development of alternatives (cheaper, nicer for the animals and for the researchers) is the best it gets.

And I know it's a clichéd argument, but I have yet to meet anyone who would save their neighbour's dog rather than their neighbour's son from an inferno.

So, to the anti-vivisectionist who retorted when I posed this question in a debate: "I'd save my son before yours but I wouldn't do vivisection on your son." Yes indeed: however strangely we may phrase it, we all know that people matter more than animals. But I kind of love my cat too, which is why I wouldn't eat him.


http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sophie_petitzeman/2006/08/confessions_of_a_vegetarian_vi.html


y'a des coups de pied aux fesses qui se perdent !

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Allez, monsieur, encore un petit effort de pensée, des fois que....