Right now, millions of mice, rats, rabbits, primates, cats, dogs, and other animals are locked inside cold, barren cages in laboratories across the country. They languish in pain, ache with loneliness, and long to roam free and use their minds.
Instead, all they can do is sit and wait in fear of the next terrifying and painful procedure that will be performed on them. The stress, sterility and boredom causes some animals to develop neurotic behaviors such incessantly spinning in circles, rocking back and forth and even pulling out their own hair and biting their own skin. They shake and cower in fear whenever someone walks past their cages and their blood pressure spikes drastically. After enduring lives of pain, loneliness and terror, almost all of them will be killed.
More than 100 million animals every year suffer and die in cruel chemical, drug, food, and cosmetics tests as well as in biology lessons, medical training exercises, and curiosity-driven medical experiments at universities. Exact numbers aren’t available because mice, rats, birds, and cold-blooded animals—who make up more than 95 percent of animals used in experiments—are not covered by even the minimal protections of the Animal Welfare Act and therefore go uncounted. To test cosmetics, household cleaners, and other consumer products, hundreds of thousands of animals are poisoned, blinded, and killed every year by cruel corporations. Mice and rats are forced to inhale toxic fumes, dogs are force-fed pesticides, and rabbits have corrosive chemicals rubbed onto their skin and eyes. Many of these tests are not even required by law, and they often produce inaccurate or misleading results. Even if a product harms animals, it can still be marketed to consumers. Cruel and deadly toxicity tests are also conducted as part of massive regulatory testing programs that are often funded by U.S. taxpayers’ money. The Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Toxicology Program, and the Department of Agriculture are just a few of the government agencies that subject animals to painful and crude tests.
“More lives could be saved and suffering stopped by educating people on the importance of avoiding fat and cholesterol, the dangers of smoking, reducing alcohol and other drug consumption, exercising regularly, and cleaning up the environment than by all the animal tests in the world.
And, as George Bernard Shaw once said, “You do not settle whether an experiment is justified or not by merely showing that it is of some use. The distinction is not between useful and useless experiments, but between barbarous and civilized behavior.” There are some medical problems that can probably only be cured by testing on unwilling people, but we don’t do it because we recognize that it would be wrong. We need to extend this same concern to other living, feeling beings, regardless of what species they may be.”
"Fish also have been victims of underhanded and shandy speciesism. We know, for example, that fish display long-term memory and clearly are sentient beings(Braithwaite, 2010, 2011). Consider what Verheijen and Flight(1997: p.362) write about fish:" There is a growing consensus that because of homology in behaviour and nervous structure all vertebrates, thus also fish, have subjective experience and so are liable to suffer." Consider also what Victoria Braithwaite writes about fish:" I have argued that there is as much evidence that fish feel pain and suffer as there is for birds and mammals - and more than there is for human neonates and preterm babies"(Braithwaite, 2010: p.153). She also notes(Braithwaite, 2011), "We now know that fish actually are cognitively, more competent than we thought before - some species of fish have very sophisticated forms of cognition... In our experiments we showed that if we hurt fish, they react, and then if we give them pain relief, they change their behaviour, strongly indicating that they feel pain." Fish have also been observed punishing after individuals who steal their food(Raihami et al., 2010)."
摘錄/引自：Marc Bekoff - Who lives, who dies, and why? How speciesism undermines compassionate conservation and social justice. 收錄於：The Politics of Species - Reshaping our Relationships with Other Animals. Edited by Raymond Corbey and Annette Lanjouw, 2013. Cambridge University Press.
◆ I see shining fish struggling within tight nets, while I hear orioles singing carefree tunes. Even trivial creatures know the difference between freedom and bondage. Sympathy and compassion should be but natural to the human heart.
「劍橋宣言的最後一段宣稱：「缺乏大腦新皮層似乎不表示生物沒有經歷情感狀態變化的能力。各類證據皆不約而同地指出：非人動物擁有構成意識所需的神經結構、神經化學及神經生理基礎物質，以及有能力展示帶有意圖的行為。因此，證據充份表明人類並非唯一擁有產生意識的神經基礎物質的生物。非人動物，包括所有哺乳類及鳥類、以及其他生物，包括章魚，也擁有這些神經基礎物質。」(“The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”) (The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, 2012, P.2)」
"...The whole point of Darwin's position was to indicate homological resemblance between human and animal behaviour, and it followed that is was no more absurd to speak of a higher mammal showing fear, reasoning power, or pleasure than to call the structure on the end of a chimpanzee's forelimb a hand. The difference was one of degree not of kind. There was one continuous 'thinking principle' throughout the animals which Darwin viewed as being contingent on the presence of an organized nervous system, and consequently 'The difference between intellect of man and animals is not so great as between living thing without thought(plants) and living thing with thought(animals)'(T i.66)"
引自Jonathan Howard,<Darwin: A Very Short Introduction>(原版於1982年出版）
中譯本：《達爾文與進化論》，趙凌霞與何竹芳譯。北京：外語教學與研究出版社（2008年出版）。
*Jonathan Howard為德國科隆大學遺傳學研究所細胞遺傳學教授，皇家學會研究員。
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"Speciesism occurs when the interests of a being are accorded less or no weight solely on the basis of species. To say that a being has interests is to say that the being has some sort of mind—any sort of mind—that prefers, desires, or wants. It is to say that there is someone who prefers, desires, or wants. You cannot act with speciesism with respect to a being that has no interests, such as a plant.
Your entire argument rests on your confusing a reaction with a response. If you put an electrical current through a wire that is attached to a bell, the bell will ring. The bell reacts; it does not respond. It is as absurd to say that a bell has a “nonconscious response” as it is to say a plant does. "
引自Gary Francione/全文：
MICHAEL MARDER AND GARY FRANCIONE DEBATE PLANT ETHICS
Gary L. Francione is Board of Governors Professor, Distinguished Professor of Law and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University.
來源：Gary L. Francione Facebook
Gleen, Cathy B., 2004, “Constructing Consumables and Consent: A Critical Analysis of Factory Farm Industry Discourse.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 28: 63.http://jci.sagepub.com/content/28/1/63.full.pdf
Weida, William J., 2004, “Considering the Rationales for Factory Farming.” Paper presentated at Environmental Health Impacts of CAFOs: Anticipating Hazards-Searching for Solutions, Iowa City, U.S.A., March 29. http://www.worc.org/userfiles/file/Weida-economicsofCAFOs.pdf
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