Comment & Debate
Michael Pollan. “An Animal’s Place”. The New York Times Magazine. November 10, 2002 – “Surely this is one of the odder paradoxes of animal rights doctrine. It asks us to recognize all that we share with animals and then demands that we act toward them in a most unanimalistic way. Whether or not this is a good idea, we should at least acknowledge that our desire to eat meat is not a trivial matter, no mere ‘gastronomic preference.’ We might as well call sex–also now technically unnecessary–a mere ‘recreational preference.’ Whatever else it is, our meat eating is something very deep indeed.”
This applies to animal testing in important ways. Humans have long-crafted animalistic instinct to pursue their own ends through the exploitation of animals in various ways. We have, for instance, killed animals for their furs to survive in cold weather. Those humans exploited animals in this way survived. Those that did not, perished. Evolution has favored humans that have exploited animals. We, therefore, have in us now a natural instinct to exploit animals. This is reflected in our instinct to test animals for our own ends. It is wrong to deny this God-given or Nature-given instinct.