ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS IN HISTORY
Animals have been abused repeatedly throughout the history of biomedical research. The idea of animal experimentation arose on one hand from pure curiosity and on the other hand from the desire to be able to conclude humans from experiments on animals.
Early Greek physician-scientists, such as Aristotle (384—322 BC), and Erasistratus (304—258 BC), performed experiments on living animals. Non-human animals were used to discover and understand the functions of living organisms. Vivisection (dissection of a living organism) was practiced on human criminals in ancient Rome and Alexandria, but the prohibition of mutilation of the human body in ancient Greece led to reliance on animal subjects.
Aristotle believed that animals lacked intelligence and therefore the concepts of justice and injustice did not apply to them. Theophrastus, a successor of Aristotle, disagreed and rejected the vivisection of animals because they can feel pain like humans and it is an insult to the gods to inflict pain on animals.
The roman physician and philosopher Galen (130—200 AD) recommended that his students vivisect animals “without pity or compassion” and warned that the “unpleasing expression of the ape when it is being vivisected” was to be expected. He gained a great deal of false knowledge through his animal experiments—partly because he transferred the anatomy of the animals he dissected to that of humans.
This false knowledge and learned apathy can still be applied today. It shows the lack of knowledge, apathy, and distance from other animals.
The publication of ‘Animal Liberation’ by Australian philosopher Peter Singer in 1975 rallied the animal rights and anti-animal testing movements by popularizing the concept of “speciesism” as analogous to racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice.
In referring specifically to animal experimentation/testing, Singer predicted that “someday.... our children’s children, when they read about what was done in laboratories in the twentieth century, will feel the same sense of horror and disbelief...”
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