Vivisection Essay

Imagine living your entire live in a cramped, horrid environment where you are deprived of food and water. You are electrocuted and are force-fed chemicals from time to time. You are nothing more than an item of disposable laboratory equipment. This is the life of animals in laboratory. Live-animal experimentation, also known as vivisection, is not only unethical, but also cruel and unnecessary. In the article “Vivisection is Right, but It is Nasty- and We must be Brave Enough to Admit This”, Michael Hanlon claims vivisection is a moral necessity that without the use of animals in the laboratory, human would not have modern medicine like antibiotics, analgesic, and cancer drugs (1). For instance, Hanlon believes by sewing kittens’ eyelids together

According to the philosopher Peter Singer, speciesists treat human interests as more fundamental than other nonhuman animals interests; therefore, speciesists ignore the interests of other species where no great benefit to human interests is concerned (Singer 279). For instance, the BUAV claims that experiments like sewing kittens’ eyelids together to study amblyopia have been done many years ago, and yet no cure has been found (Hanlon 1). As a result, Singer argues nonhuman animals are regarded as only “an item of laboratory equipment” (281). Many of the experiments on animals are carried out for rather trivial interests such that speciesists give the weight of nonhuman animals less weight than the interests of human beings. Singer asserts that human beings need to apply the principle of equal consideration of interests to animals to give equal weight on them (Singer 277). Singer’s theory of equal consideration of interests is extremely useful because it sheds insight on vivisection since the fundamental issue in how human may treat animals is whether they suffer and such that pains of animals and humans deserve equal considerations (Singer 278). Whether it’s poultry farming or vivisection, sentient animals have interests of not experiencing pain or suffering (Singer 278). According to Hanlon, animal recruits lead better lives and better deaths in laboratory than in poultry