ANIMAL RIGHTS AND WRONGS

WHICH of these animal experiments should be allowed?

— medical experiments on insects to find cures for cancer — medical experiments on rats to investi- gate causes of arthritis — psychological experiments on cats to study reactions to pain — the systematic blinding of rabbits to test new shampoos when there are already thousands of safe shampoos on the market.

I became a vegetarian over 20 years ago as a feeble gesture of support to the ani- mals we abuse and kill. During these years I have watched a growing concern in the West for species other than our own and a proliferation of groups dedicated to animal welfare. But as interest in the plight of ani- mals increases, so does uncertainty about the moral and legal base for dealing with them. The term 'animal rights' would sound strange to 19th-century ears and today there is almost total confusion about the definition of the term and what it implies.

Why is it unacceptable to hunt foxes but acceptable to hunt fish? Would it be good or bad if the London Zoo closed down? Why may a woman drape herself with the skin of a cow but not the skin of a leopard? Which is more cruel, the farming of tame animals or the hunting of wild ones? In my home continent of Africa, the questions are more urgent. Why should starving Africa not follow the example of Europe and the United States, slaughter all the wild ani- mals and plant crops where they now roam?

At the heart of the confusion lies the refusal by almost the entire animal rights movement to distinguish between science and poetry. For some reason, people in the modern world, campaigning for whatever cause, are ashamed to admit human preju- dice as a motive, shy to admit religious belief and try to enlist the detached author- ity of science. Thus you get absurd state- ments from ecologists that tigers should be saved from extinction because of their value in scientific research. But while the official spokesmen for animal groups pre- tend to invoke science, their posters and public protests invoke pure poetry. Science tells you about the universe itself; poetry tells you what you feel, or should feel, about the universe. Science describes; it does not instruct. Science gives no guidance at all as to how humans should treat animals. There are various moral and philosophical schemes for our correct behaviour towards animals but they are all unworkable.

The most popular scheme suggests that 'all life is sacred'. It is scientifically true that all life is related: the biological essence of an elephant and a fungus is the same. But all life sacred? How does one act on this principle? How should we protect the sacred life of lice, locusts and Aids viruses? The immune system of our bodies is there for the sole purpose of murdering living things. If we believe all life is sacred, should we ban vaccines, which simply make the immune system even more efficient at killing? You can kill more living things with a small bottle of disinfectant than you can with an arsenal of hunting rifles. An idea I first heard in my biology lessons at school was something called 'the balance of nature'. We should protect this or that creature to preserve the balance of nature. A corollary of this is that 'every liv- ing thing is there for a purpose'. In fact the only 'purpose' any animal aspires to is its survival and propagation, at the expense of other animals if necessary. It never makes the slightest effort to preserve its environ- ment. It eats and breeds as hard as it can until it is limited by lack of food, lack of territory or predation. Thus nature can do nothing other than find a balance, whatev- er the circumstances. You could kill every lion, leopard, rhino and elephant in Africa and nature would still find a balance. There is a balance of nature in a sewer. Nothing man can do, including atomic war, could stop nature from finding a balance. One of the constant themes in the four-billion-year history of life on Earth has been the anni- hilation of species by other species.

We live in an age where science fiction has replaced fairy tales and engineering is given a mythological aspect (although never by engineers). We are encouraged to admire and conserve certain animals because they have achieved a level of engi- neering excellence. At the time of the film Jaws we were told that the Great White Shark was 'a perfect killing machine'. I sup- pose the animal ability we most admire is flight, and in traditional poems in praise of birds we now hear that an eagle or an alba- tross is 'a perfect flying machine'. But there is a creature whose aeronautic skill far sur- passes either.

This creature is menaced from land and air by a dreadful array of enemies, who use higher and higher reaches of technology to detect, intercept and kill it. Yet it is able to prevail against them thanks mainly to its superlative flight. Guided by twin oscillat- ing gyroscopic compasses, driven by a propulsion unit developing fearsome power density, its wings controlled through a servo-mechanism by a control system of blindingly quick response time, this crea- ture is the finest flying machine of flesh or metal that our planet has ever seen. It is of course the fly. Over a range of flying abili- ties, especially manoeuvre, the fly is with- out peer. It is leagues ahead of eagles or jet fighters. Yet man, who is attempting to save the eagle from extinction, is attempt- ing to exterminate the fly.

When you set the scientific listing of life on Earth against the poetic view, the nar- rowness of the latter is astonishing. The animal kingdom is divided into about 25 phyla. Animals with bones — mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish — alto- gether comprise just one phylum, Chorda- ta, and represent a mere sliver of life. Yet the poetic view of life is dominated by this single phylum. By far the biggest and most successful phylum is Arthropoda, which consists of insects, spiders, centipedes and crustacea, and which accounts for over three-quarters of all animal species. The most numerous arthropods are insects and the most numerous insects are beetles. If the cabins of Noah's Ark were allocated democratically according to the number of species, half the cabins would be filled by beetles, and all the mammals, from mice to elephants, would have to share a small cor- ner of one cabin.

Our phylum is not only small in numbers but has been insignificant in forming the world. The battles of the poetic vision between great dinosaurs or hairy beasts with huge fangs have been a brief side- show in the drama of evolution. Smaller, more multitudinous players, using pro- boscis and sucker rather than tooth and claw, have shaped our destiny. Two hun- dred million years ago, flowering plants, which now dominate the world's flora, did not exist. Pollen was carried passively and wastefully by the wind. Flying insects offered a more efficient transport of pollen and the first flowers evolved to take advan- tage of this possibility by attracting insects to them. Thereafter flowering plants and insects exploited each other and multiplied in number and variety. A small mammalian order, the primates, evolved in the flower- ing trees, their unusual limbs designed for climbing branches and plucking fruit. We are one of them. The human race is an accidental by-product of insect activity.

Whenever the subject of animal rights is discussed, the word 'anthropomorphic' comes rumbling into the conversation like a big medicine ball. Animal righters are accused of being concerned only about `furry and cuddly' animals and regarding them as people. The accusation is just, but the animal righters, as practical campaign- ers, cannot behave otherwise. A picture of an endangered mammal, such as a panda, wrings our hearts; a picture of an endan- gered worm does not. It is time that the animal righters abandoned all claims to sci- entific impartiality and admitted that their campaigns are based entirely on human prejudice. Tigers should be protected not because of any bogus scientific reason but for the poetic reason that they are magnifi- cent creatures. Humans are capable of sympathy for few animals and these alone could be given 'rights' and protection.

The most important qualification for ani- mal rights is size. Humans find it difficult to love any animal smaller than a mouse. (The overwhelming majority of animals are smaller than mice.) The bigger, the better. Whales and elephants are universally admired but even villainous animals can earn our affection if they are large enough. Recently the South African government declared the Great White Shark a protect- ed species. (It was being fished to extinc- tion. So much for 'the perfect killing machine'.) The declaration was widely applauded, and those who cheered includ- ed coast dwellers, such as I, who plunge into the warm ocean off Natal with a pleas- ing tingle of fear for the rows of huge teeth that might be pointing at our bellies although the danger from sharks in South African seas seems less than the danger from pit bull terriers in British streets.

If you show children photographs of vari- ous animals, their responses are unvarying: lions and eagles (admiration); rabbits and koala bears (affection); snakes and spiders (horror); cattle and sheep (boredom); chimpanzees and orang-outangs (laughter). Animals that kill are usually more admired than animals that are killed: baby lions are more lovable than baby buffaloes. This might be from an inherent human instinct to respect brute force but is more likely to be because the killers look like us. Carni- vores, like us, have both eyes on the front of the head whereas the herbivores have eyes on the sides of the head. The fact that we think apes funny is a curiosity. The more animals resemble us, the more we admire them, until they resemble us too much, and then we laugh. If you conducted a poll and asked people to name the most beautiful animal face, I guess that the cat family would come top. Perhaps we consid- er the cat's face an idealisation of our own and the ape's a caricature. The nervous system of cats and dogs is like ours, their response to pain is the same as ours and we can recognise a range of emotions in their faces. So it is logical to regard them anthropomorphically. The nervous systems of spiders and insects are different from ours and when we look at enlarged photographs of them we find it is impossible to recognise any emotion in the eyes of those alien and terrifying faces. Indeed it is often difficult to recognise eyes at all. They might or might not suffer exquisite emotion but we are unable to sympathise with them.

The Bible, in words rather shocking today, instructs us to 'have dominion' over every living thing. Now it so happens that we have got dominion over living things that we like, such as oak trees, elephants and dolphins, but not over living things that we do not like, such as insects, fungi and viruses. Man can never hope to conquer insects. Their numbers are too large, their strategies too varied and their adaptations too swift. They are more likely to decide our fate than we theirs: if the Aids virus learned how to survive in the gut of fleas and mosquitoes, the continued existence of our species might be in doubt. But we are lords over the large animals of our own phylum and once we take a deep breath and admit that our attitude towards them is purely subjective and poetic, it is then quite straightforward to treat them in a logical and consistent way.

The first thing would be to award animal rights by species. This could be done in accordance with popular human sentiment, grading species by rarity, lovableness and closeness to Homo sapiens. Rare, lovable mammal species such as tigers and gorillas would get most rights. No experiments would ever be allowed on them. Their lives could not be sacrificed for human lives, which would give them a legal value only slightly less than human. (In practice we often put a higher value on animal lives than human ones. Individuals in the West spend more money on pet food than famine relief, and would be more saddened by the loss of the world's remaining 3,000 tigers than the loss of 3,000 humans in, say, a Chinese earthquake.) Lesser rights would be given to other selected animals. A jury system would weigh the rights of each species against the benefits to man of ex- ploiting and killing them.

Questions of treatment of the chosen animals would be answered anthropomor- phically. If you were in the position of that animal, what would you choose? Here the most important question is also the most famous in literature: To be or not to be? Had Hitler won the war, there might now have been a generation of human beings bred entirely for medical experimentation. It is better that this generation never exist- ed. Similarly it is better for animals never to have existed than to have existed in fac- tory farms or laboratories.

There is a simple choice over the fate of African elephants. Either they exist to be hunted for trophy and ivory in a controlled manner or they do not exist at all. Africans will only preserve elephants if it pays them to do so, and the money can only come from hunting and ivory. I believe it is better for elephants to live their natural lives in the bush before suffering an unexpected and quick death by bullet than not to live at all.

Personally I should ban outright all ani- mal experiments for cosmetics. I regard the Draize eye irritancy test, which destroys the eyes of rabbits to test yet more cosmetics when there are already multitudes of safe cosmetics on the market, as an abomina- tion. Such a ban, if universally enforced, would have little effect on the profits of the cosmetic industries. But the correct path would be to subject animal testing of cos- metics to public scrutiny. Let reasonable men and women witness the Draize test and make their judgment on it. Then pass that judgment into law.

Similar judgment should be passed on factory farming, which is also an abomina- tion and a scandalous waste of food. The grain that could feed ten men is fed to ani- mals to produce enough meat to feed one man. I believe that farming of livestock is acceptable if the animals lead what we should judge as natural lives, such as do the sheep in the British highlands or the South African Karoo. (You cannot grow crops in either region). If a ban on factory farming made meat a rare luxury, that would simply improve human health. Twenty years with- out meat has done me nothing but good.

To answer my opening question, I should allow the first experiments and ban the fol- lowing three. What would the British pub- lic answer?