(N.B.: My thoughts on these matters have been influenced greatly by C.S. Lewis’s essay, “On Vivisection.”

I used to think the animal-rights advocates were the biggest idiots on God’s green earth. How, I used to wonder, can anybody be against “saving lives?” But now I realize it’s not that simple.

Most people, myself included would assign a greater value to the life of a human being than that of a rat or a dog. But, as Noam Chomsky said, Whoever defines the question wins the argument. It’s an open question as to just how much the pharmaceutical industry is committed to “saving lives.”

This book by Nortin M. Hadler, M.D., details all the tricks the pharmaceutical companies use to get their pills and potions approved on the basis of meager effects which may be statistically significant without being clinically significant. And, since the possibility of iatrogenic illness always exists, anything they do that doesn’t have clear beneficial effects should always be considered harmful. Is it really worth it, to make all these animals suffer, just so the pharmaceutical industry can make even more billions foisting more useless and/or harmful “medicines” on the public?

The animal rights activists like to argue that results on animals do not tell you anything about how a given medicine or procedure will work on people. I disagree. Consider the astonishing story of the artificial heart, as detailed in this book by medical anthropologists Renee Fox and Judith P. Swazey. The designers tested that thing in sheep and calves for years, and every time they implanted it in an animal subject, the poor thing developed massive infections and suffered terribly and died soon after. So they tried it out in people, and lo and behold, they developed massive infections and suffered terribly and died soon after. I can’t help wondering what was the point of testing it in animals, if they were determined to use it in people, regardless of how dismal the animal results were.

By the way, the mendacity of the developers of the artificial heart didn’t end there. Robert Jarvik, the developer of the artificial heart, who has never in his life been licensed to practice medicine anywhere on the planet, used to give press conferences dressed in surgical scrubs. Why didn’t he dress up as a cowboy, or a fireman? Would have made just as much sense.

And if you were wondering what was the medical or scientific value of all this, the answer is: none at all. Dr. William Devries, the surgeon who implanted the Jarvik-7 artificial heart into the hapless Dr. Barney Clark, later moved his base of operations from the University of Utah to Humana Hospital in Kentucky. When the University of Utah IRB asked to see his files, he claimed he lost them! Either he was lying or he was telling the truth, and frankly, I’m not even sure which is more appalling.

Still, I believe that a cogent case for animal experimentation could be made, provided such research was restricted to that which actually had the potential to save human lives and/or improve their quality (and not for, say, the twenty-ninth drug to come on the market to treat “erectile dysfunction,” or some such), if great care was taken to avoid the least bit of unnecessary pain in the animals, and if people would live their lives in such a manner as to justify the animals’ involuntary sacrifice on our parts. That last part clearly is not happening. Check out this article about dogs trussed up and forced to smoke 30 cigarettes a day as part of an effort to develop a “safer cigarette.” Why the Hell don’t people just stop smoking cigarettes? Or, if they won’t do that, why won’t they accept the consequences of their behavior? After all, they had a choice in the matter – the dogs don’t.

I’ve been wondering, as of late, how the people who do such research can face themselves in the mirror with a clear conscience. Then again, maybe they can’t. One of my students, who works in a veterinarian's office, told me this astounding story. She said that some of their clients are people who work in biomedical research labs, where their work involves giving cancer to rats. After their work is finished, they are supposed to kill the rats, of course, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they smuggle the rats out and take them home and spend thousands of dollars trying to cure them. (No, I don’t know how they decide which rats die and which are worth saving.) That strikes me as an absolutely bizarre method of expiating one’s feelings of guilt, and certainly a poor substitute for an intelligent conversation about the trade-offs inherent in this or any other human choice.