The following statement concerning Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation (New York Review/Random House, second edition, 1990), was sent to The New York Review following a review by Mr. Singer of several books on the treatment of animals in the April 9 issue.
To the Editors:
The objectives of both editions of Singer’s book are clearly stated
in the preface of the 1975 edition, which is reprinted in the 1990 version. He
wishes to convince us that “animals suffer from the tyranny of human beings”
(p. iii) and to persuade us to end this “oppression and exploitation” of
animals by extending to them “the basic moral principle of equal consideration
of interests” (p. ii). To achieve these goals, he uses the techniques of
propagandists, but he masquerades them in the guise of responsible scholarship.
His methods include quoting authorities out of context, misquoting them, and
quoting from obscure sources that are at best difficult to find and frequently
impossible to check. Because of space limitations, we shall restrict our
comments to his chapter on the use of animals in biomedical research, and present
only three examples of the misrepresentations that it contains.
Singer selects research projects that can be exploited for maximal
emotional impact and portrays them as the norm. About 25 percent of the pages
in this chapter are devoted to criticizing studies on animal behavior and drug
addiction—yet such research constitutes a very small fraction of the total use
of animals in research and testing. He is particularly critical of the work of
Harry Harlow and others who studied the effects of rearing infant monkeys in
isolation. In attempting to discredit the value of and
need for such studies, Singer quotes (p. 32) a British psychiatrist, John
Bowlby, who wrote:
The evidence has been reviewed at some length
because much of it is still little known and the issue of whether deprivation
causes psychiatric disturbance is still discussed as though it were an open
question. It is submitted that the evidence is now such that it leaves no room
for doubt regarding the general proposition—that the prolonged deprivation of
the young child of maternal care may have grave and far-reaching effects on his
character and so on the whole of his future life. Although it is a proposition
exactly similar in form to those regarding the evil after-effects of rubella in
foetal life or deprivation of vitamin D in infancy, there is a curious
resistance to accepting it.
Singer’s quote deleted the important qualifier
in the first sentence (underlined) without using ellipsis dots to indicate the
deletion, and he neglected to include the last sentence (also underlined). He
states that even though Bowlby’s conclusions were made in 1951, before Harlow
began his research, “This did not deter Harlow and his colleagues from devising
and carrying out their monkey experiments” (p. 32). However, when stated
correctly (i.e. as he wrote them), Bowlby’s conclusions support doing the kind
of studies that Harlow and others conducted in order to test the validity of
the clinical evidence in an animal model. Such tests would (and did) convince
skeptical physicians of the dire consequences of inadequate maternal attention.
It is significant, but not surprising, that
Singer neglects to mention any of the benefits that have derived from the
studies of Harlow and his associates. These benefits include improved methods
of care for premature infants so that they thrive and thus can be removed from
incubators earlier, and the acquisition of important insights into helping
children who have problems socializing with their peers.
In another attempt to discredit animal psychology research, Singer
selectively quotes (p. 47) from an article by Steven Maier, which examines the
usefulness of learned helplessness in animals as a model of depression in
humans. The complete statement of Maier (beginning in
the middle of a paragraph, where Singer’s quote begins) follows, and the
sections that Singer deleted are underlined:
It can be argued that there is not enough
agreement about the characteristics, neurobiology, induction, and
prevention/cure of depression to make such comparison meaningful. Indeed, it
has been argued that depression itself would not meet a rigorous application of
the above criteria (McKinney, 1974). That is, depression might be sufficiently
heterogenous in behavioral characteristics, neurobiology, causation, and
prevention, that a given collection of depressed individuals might not closely
match another. It might seem that a consideration of subtypes would resolve the
issue, but even subtypes are probably not unitary in nature. Even a subtype of
depression is a clinically defined syndrome or collection of events, and there
is no strong reason to believe that such a collection will have a single cause.
There may be many
“routes” to what is labelled as depression, and they may not reduce to a single
type even on a conceptual level. It would thus appear unlikely that learned
helplessness is a model of depression in any general sense. However, animal
“models” seem useful precisely because they do not duplicate the full clinical
phenomenon but can allow the study of a single “route” in isolation [emphasis
added].
Singer then states (p. 47), “Although Maier tries to salvage
something from this dismaying conclusion by saying that learned helplessness
may constitute a model not of depression but of ‘stress and coping,’ he has
effectively admitted that more than thirty years of animal experimentation have
been a waste of time and of substantial amounts of taxpayers’ money, quite
apart from the immense amount of acute physical pain that they have caused.”
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1992/11/05/animal-liberation-an-exchange/
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