How Even Empathetic People Justify Animal Research
It’s a question that has long plagued those of us fighting to protect animals:
How can so many otherwise empathetic humans continue to accept, support, and even promote practices that harm, torture, and kill nonhuman animals?
When it comes to animals exploited “in the name of science”, a new paper published by the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology provides an answer:
“Many empathetic humans lie to themselves, often unconsciously, about the suffering of animals used in research.”
To cope with the conflict of wanting to avoid harm but still benefit from animal research, humans downplay the mental and emotional lives of nonhuman animals. They “pretend[] lab animals have no inner lives or complex mental capacities”.
As the study’s authors explain, many humans “minimize animal welfare concerns resulting from animal experimentation” to ease their own discomfort.
One strategy is to tell themselves that animals in laboratories lack minds complex enough to experience suffering. By downplaying animals’ mental lives, humans can “reduce the conflict” between their values and their actions (or inactions), rationalizing behaviors that would otherwise feel deeply wrong.
In other words, humans — who want to avoid responsibility for animal suffering they accept or promote — deceive themselves about what exploited animals feel.
Just as humans ignore the minds of animals raised for food to justify eating them, many humans rationalize animal research by convincing themselves that animals inside laboratories somehow have “fewer mental capacities” than the same animals outside laboratories.
In so doing, even otherwise empathetic humans drive the very same objectification of nonhuman animals that the animal research industry itself advances: reducing sentient beings to “[m]indless furry test-tubes”, valued by humans only for “‘what they can do rather than who they are’”.
This false categorization is not only unfounded; it’s also destructive.
Attempting to rationalize exploitation does nothing to change the reality of exploitative practices like animal research, which from inception have been rooted in the use and suffering of nonhuman animals for the claimed benefit of humans.
Instead, we humans must stop trying to excuse harm and oppression; and we must start being honest with ourselves.
Once we do, we will see that — together — we have the strength not only to recognize the harms humans cause, but also to end them.