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Question: If vivisection is so beneficial...

If vivisection is so beneficial to humans, why don’t we ever hear about it or see it on TV?


As Peter Singer states, “people sometimes think that all this experimentation [vivisection] is for vital medical purposes, and so will reduce suffering overall. This comfortable belief is very wide of the mark.” (Singer, 2001: 33).

Ask any average reader or television watcher what vivisection is and they probably will not know. Ask them what animal experimentation is and they will probably say it’s how we’ll find the cure to cancer.

But do you really know what’s going on behind those walls? Or do you just keep repeating what “they” have told you?

As John McArdle points out,


If the exploitation of laboratory animals involved small amounts of money and only a few animals, it might be difficult to appreciate the significance of the problem. The numbers, however, are very impressive, with the “small” biomedical research industry consuming $8 to $10 billion and nearly 60 million animals every year.
(McArdle, 1989: 45)


He also reminds us that “biomedical research is perhaps the last multi-billion dollar, almost entirely self-regulated, industry in the country”(McArdle, 1989: 45).


Being a closed and privileged society, the vivisection community remains essentially unaccountable to the public. Although their experiments are supposedly done for our benefit and are funded by consumer tax dollars, we are generally excluded from decisions on who receives that money, how it is spent, which projects are approved, what is done to the animals physically and psychologically and what represents proper and acceptable standards of performance.
(McArdle, 1989:45)


Maybe it’s time we start asking questions and to take a closer look at how our tax dollars are being spent. I can assure you that I do not want to financially support this killing frenzy just because these same people that are being paid to do it... call it beneficial.



McArdle, John "Their Eyes Don’t Lie,” THE ANIMALS’ VOICE MAGAZINE 2, no. 3, 40-45.

Singer, Peter “All Animals Are Equal” ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY, eds. Michael Zimmerman Et. Al., 3rd Ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001).