Wisconsin Public Television University Place  The Animal Research Controversy  Harold Herzog  4/25/13 UP866  cc >> Thank you for coming. My pleasurable job here is to introduce Dr. Harold Herzog, who I met at a human/animal interactions conference quite a while ago. When he ran into me in the line for the lobster banquet dinner and discovered I didn't have a ticket and taught me how to sneak into a banquet without a ticket. Exactly what that has to say about two people who have spent a lot of their life studying ethics and ethical behavior, I will leave that to you to decide. I will say in our defense, I did have a ticket; I just left it in my room. But that was the beginning of a lovely collegial relationship. So, it's an honor and a pleasure to introduce Hal Herzog. This is the last of this year's talks sponsored by the Forum on Animal Research Ethics, whose goal is to facilitate communication between researchers at the university who use animals in their studies, university students, and members of the community. Hal is a professor of psychology at Western Carolina University, and he's a leader in the field of anthrozoology, the scientific study of human/animal relations. He's the author of the groundbreaking book Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. 

If you haven't read it, it's absolutely fascinating. He's a member of numerous task forces, editorial boards, scientific advisory boards, and associations dedicated to the scientific study of and ethical issues related to human/animal relations. Dr. Herzog is one of those rare individuals, in my opinion, who bridges the gap between scientists who study animals and members of the general public who love and/or are fascinated by them. I think that's best evidenced by both his book and his blog in Psychology Today online called Animals and Us. It's always fascinating. It's always thought provoking. It's my favorite blog of all of the ones out there. So, Hal and I share a fascination with the biology and psychology of nonhuman animals. We share an equal fascination with the illogical behavior of our own species and an intense dislike of long introduction to our speeches. So, with that, I will turn it over to Dr. Harold Herzog. 

[APPLAUSE]  >> I want to thank the organizing community, and especially Tricia, for making this possible. This is my first time at Wisconsin, and I've had a wonderful time. You live in a great place. I'd always heard Madison was a great place, and it's all true. As Tricia mentioned, we first met in Boston, back in 1987 I think it was, and we were the oddballs out at this conference because I think we were about the only people there who were actually animal behaviorists. She was working on or had just finished her dissertation, which I regard just as a stunning piece of work. It was an amazing piece of research. >> We can't hear you back here. >> Ah. This thing's on. 

>> Turn the volume up.  >> Can you hear me now? Better, better, better? How about the back row? Can you hear me in the back row? Oh, good. Okay. If you have trouble hearing, wave and let me know. I got a hold of Tricia again when I was thinking about writing a book, and she was largely responsible for me to get together with the publisher. And I don't think I would have a book out if it hadn't been for Tricia's help. And I actually want to, my book covers a lot of territory. It covers all the way from why people love pets to whether or not Hitler was really a vegetarian. People oftentimes want to talk about stuff like that, but there is a chapter on animal research and the moral problems associated with it and the moral complexity of that as an issue. But I never get asked about that stuff. 

So, to me, to be able to come and talk about something that I think is really important but I never get asked about is really a treat. I want to actually start by reading a short section from my book which sort of talks a little bit about how I got, in a personal way, involved in this issue. The chapter in the book on animal research is called The Moral Status of Mice. And this is fairly short. My first brush with the moral complexities of animal research was in my second year of graduate school. I had been assigned to work in the lab of a biochemist. One of my jobs was to collect molecules from the skin surfaces of earthworms. The procedure involved dropping worms into 180-degree hot water. Two minutes later, I would remove their inert bodies from the hot water and freeze little vials of eau de worm for chemical analysis. I performed this procedure several times and viewed it as just another lab chore, one that I didn't enjoy but which caused me no moral discomfort. 

The worms died instantly, and, after all, they were just worms. But one morning I was asked by the lab manager to do something different. A scientist from another university who was studying the skin chemistry of desert creations had arranged for some of his analysis to be done at our laboratory. Several days later, a box stamped "Caution: Contains Live Animals" was delivered to the lab. And inside was a virtual menagerie: a dozen crickets, a pair of eerily pale scorpions, a lizard about six inches long, a small snake, a lovely little gray deer mouse. And the task of liquifying the animals fell to me. Well, I'd plunged the occasional lobster into a pot of boiling water with only a slight moral twinge, and I did not expect to be bothered by my morning's task. I lit the Bunsen burner and started to work my way up the phylogenetic scale. Like the worms, the cricket died almost instantly when they hit the boiling water. No problem. 

Next came the arthropods. In the few days they had been in the lab, I'd come to like the scorpions. They had an air of menace that I found fascinating. But they also had more body mass than the insects, and they took a little longer to die when I dropped them into the beaker of water. I began to wonder about what I was doing. The lizard was a striped juvenile of the genus Cnemidophorus. My stomach turned as I lifted it from the cage. I began to sweat. My hands shook a little when I dropped it in the near boiling water. The lizard did not die quickly. 

It thrashed around for maybe 10 seconds, maybe more, before becoming still. The little snake was an elegant racer with big black eyes. More shaking hands and sweating brow, and the thrashing reptile was soon reduced to molecules swirling in a solution. Finally, there was the mouse. I weighed the mouse, calculated the appropriate amount of distilled water, and I poured the water into the beaker and turned on the heat. As the water approached the 180-degree mark, I realized that I just could not do the mouse. I turned off the Bunsen burner and with a mixture of trepidation and relief, walked into the lab manager's office, and I told him that I'd made the extracts with most of the animals but I just could not drop a live mouse into a beaker of scalding hot water. So my boss did the mouse while I waited in the next room. I have thought about my predicament many times since that day. In hindsight, I'm struck by the similarity between my task that morning and the plight of the subjects in Stanley Milgram's infamous obedience experiments. 

As all introductory psychology students learn, the hapless participants in these studies were instructed to administer a series of electrical shocks of increasing intensity to subjects in an adjacent room. The majority of people in the experiment administered shocks they thought would be extremely painful, if not lethal. Like Milgram's participants, I was confronted with a series of escalating choice points. But in my case, they were based on the phylogenetic scale rather than electric shock levels. The difference was that in the Milgram study, the shocks were a ruse. The supposedly shocked subject was really a confederate. There were no real shocks. In my laboratory, the animals really died. When I look back on the incident, I get some satisfaction in knowing that I refused to boil a living mouse, but I really wish I had quit between the cricket and the scorpion. This event provoked me to ask myself questions that I still struggle with today. 

What's the difference between researchers who kill mice because they're trying to discover a new treatment for breast cancer and the legions of good people who smash the spines of mice in their kitchen with snap traps or slowly poison them with D-Con? Why was it easy for me to plunge the cricket into hot water, harder for me to kill the lizard, and impossible for me to boil a mouse? Was it a matter of size, phylogenetic status, nervous system development, the grisly manner of the death, or just the fact that the mouse was really, really cute? Were the results of this experiment really worth the death and suffering of the animals? Are they ever? So, it was a number of events like this that got me thinking, as an animal researcher, about the moral complexities of our use of research. And that's what I want to talk about today. I want to say a little about my background just so you know where I'm coming from on this issue. For the first third of my career, I was an animal researcher. I studied the development and distinctive behaviors in animals and, specifically, mostly baby snakes but I also studied chickens and alligators and crocodiles and all kind of interesting things like that. I was drawn to studying animals because I liked them so much and I'm so intrigued by them. So I was in the paradoxical position that scientists can get into when they really like animals and they wind up having to do things that are not so nice. I became interested in ethical issues because of these incidents. I served on the Animal Behavior Committee, Animal Care Committee. I've been on the board of directors at the Scientists Center for Animal Welfare. 

But I became increasingly interested in all kind of ways that people in real life deal with moral issues with animals. So instead of studying my snakes, which I was increasingly  finding boring, I found myself more interested in people like circus animal trainers, cock fighters, animal activists and researchers, veterinary students, people that live in the real world where they have to wake up in the morning and they have to deal with ethical issues with animals. And that's basically, at one point I closed up my lab, sent off my snakes, and I've been doing anthrozoology every since. I want to lay my cards on the table in terms of where I stand on animal research so you just sort of know where I am. Some people live in worlds in which they have great moral clarity in their lives. They live in worlds of moral black and white. I have some envy for that. I have a lot of respect for it and some envy. However, I'm not one of those people. I live in worlds of moral grays. 

So, I tend to see complexity where some people see clarity. So, I inhabit a moral territory that the philosopher Strachan Donnelley called the troubled middle. I don't have the answers to the complicated issues associated with animal research. I'm not here to tell the University of Wisconsin how they should be treating their animals and which studies they should approve and which ones that they shouldn't approve. And the bottom line is I do support some forms of animal research. On the other hand, I understand and I respect the arguments, some of the arguments against that research. I want to give just an overview of this talk. This is sort of a tough audience because some of you are here just because you're interested in the area generally but might not know much about it. Some of you work on this professionally. You might philosophers, you might be scientists, you might serve on the University Animal Care Committee. 

So it's sort of tough to sort of talk to all of you at the same time. What I decided to do is I'm going to talk in sort of broad strokes, generally about my perspective on the psychology and the sociology of the animal rights debate and what I see as the toughest moral issues, but I don't necessarily have a resolution for them. So, I want to go ahead and get started. C.S. Lewis said the rarest thing in the world is rational discussion of vivisection. The term vivisection has come to mean, it originally meant dissection, but it's come to mean basically a general term, oftentimes a derogatory term used by animal rights activists against animal research generally. Animal research is in the news. This is stuff from this week. In fact, some of this is stuff from today. So, on Monday there was a paper in the journal Nature about animal activists breaking into a lab in Milan, Italy, taking the animals, supposedly liberating the animals, which it's not too good to liberate lab rats and rabbits and stuff like that. They don't do well when you let them loose in the wild. 

And just the New York Times this morning had a, I thought it was quite a shocking article about the fact that Harvard University is closing up their primate lab. So this stuff is in the news today. The subtitle of my book is Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals, and what I want to talk about today specifically is why it's so hard to think straight about animal research. And so what I'm going to be dealing with is things like why is this such a divisive issue. And there's some subtext here. One is moral consistency. How can we be okay with killing the animals in our kitchen with snap traps, the mice in our kitchen, at the same time we're opposed to using them for research? How is it that disagreements can get so bitter between reasonably good people that are oftentimes very smart but have very different issues on this? And then there's this business of that seeing the world in black and white versus gray. So that's sort of the background. I think, for me, of all the morally complicated interactions with animals, animal research is the toughest. Eating is a no-brainer. 

We shouldn't eat animals. I'm willing to admit that. That's a no-brainer. We eat animals because they taste good. That's not a moral argument. On the other hand, animal research is different. Animal research, I think, does pit human welfare sometimes against animal welfare in a way which is non-trivial and which is serious. So I think this is the toughest of all our issues. The value of animal research is a mixed bag, and I didn't know what a mixed bag it was until I actually wrote my chapter on animal research and it actually made me questions in some new ways, the value of animal research. I still believe in it. 

It didn't fundamentally change my mind, but I don't believe, I have a more nuance view now than I did when I started writing that chapter. So, for example, in Nature, again just recently, there was this article on, basically, making kidneys that will work, artificial kidneys and putting them in rats and they actually work. There's 30,000 people a year in the United States that desperately need a kidney and can't get one. If we could kill, I don't know how many rats I'd be willing to kill to get those people kidneys, but there would be a bunch of them. On the other hand, this paper just came out in the National Academy of Sciences. Very, very, very prestigious journal. It was on how mouse research has been essentially a complete waste when it comes to coming up with treatments for human inflammatory diseases. And the authors of this paper, which are scientists themselves, conclude there have nearly 150 clinical trials testing candidates, excuse me, candidate agents intended to block inflammatory responses in critically ill patients. That is to say they worked on mice. None of them have worked on people. 

So, we have these two sides of this issue. So, the problems I'm going to be talking about tonight are what I call the public attitude problem with is that the public attitude towards animals is screwed up in so many ways and on so many issues. The medical problem, the medical problem is, is animal research really necessary for the advance of medicine? The animal care committee problem. How is it that animal care committees, how is that scientists and people serving on these committees can actually decide what research should be done and what research shouldn't be done. There's the philosophical problem of whether or not animal research is ethical. And finally, the psychological problem, which is of interest to me, which is the problem of the psychology of discussion or the psychology of debate. How smart people can get together and try to come to some sort of common grounds. And then, you've got the University of Wisconsin problem, which is your problem, not my problem, and I'm not the person that's going to tell you how to answer that problem. But this has come up. You've been in the news lately. 

By the way, this happened after Tricia invited me to give this talk. She said, oh, by the way, there are some hot issues on campus now. Thanks. And here are the two that I know about. There may be more. One is the Kalin lab monkey proposal, which I'm going to talk about in more detail. And the other is this 2008 double trouble study. Even though the study came out in 2008, PETA's recently released the pictures. I've looked at those pictures, and they are in fact grisly. But the study was designed to improve cochlear implants for the deaf. 

But I want to talk about a little history. I don't know if you can see. I don't have a pointer here, but, basically, this painting is called a physiological demonstration of vivisection in a dog. Back in the 1700s and 1800s, anatomists were starting to try to figure out the anatomy of the body, and they did it oftentimes using animals, oftentimes dogs, and there was no anesthesia then. So what they would do is do things like nail the dogs, a living dog, to a board. This is an actual painting of a dissection. In this case, the dog is not nailed to the board, but his arms are tied, his arms and legs are tied down. I don't know if you can see if very well, but you can see the medical students are sort of hovering over like good scientists, showing no remorse. And I don't know if you can see, that's a second dog in there. Can you see the dog in the corner sort of looking on at the dog? The dog is looking sort of puzzled. 

What's going on here? Well, in the middle of the 18th century, there began to be some public concern about this with the rise of what was called the Victorian Animal Rights Movement. An example of this is that in 1874, at the meeting of the British Medical Association, there was a demonstration of a live dog dissection, which was essentially like this. And the president of the Rural College of Surgeons, this guy Dr. Thomas --, rushes in to the proceedings and tries to stop them. And he says no. He says this is cruel. And the surgeon that was doing the surgery simply replied, that dog is insensible; he is not suffering anything. And this is the classic Cartesian view that animals are basically machines that don't feel pain, that only humans are sentient creatures. The dog doesn't really feel pain. The committee that voted, what should we do? They voted and they voted to continue the dissection. The stereotype of this unfeeling science is Claude Bernard. 

Claude Bernard, he sort of deserves his reputation in some ways because he wrote things like, "The physiologist is no ordinary man; he does not hear the animals' cries of pain; he is blind to the blood that flows; he sees nothing but his idea." Well, sometimes this idea that scientists don't believe that animals feel pain is still made. And the question is, is this still the case? So, for example, Matt Scully, Matthew Scully, who is George Bush's speechwriter, got interested in animal rights, animal issues, became an animal rights activist, and wrote a book called Dominion, 2003. And he says it remains, I was reading this book as I was writing this chapter, he says, "It remains the working assumption of many, if not most, animal researchers feel their subjects do not experience pain." I know a lot of animal researchers, and I don't think they felt like that. So, I read that, I thought that's not true. I ran over to the biology department at my university and I grabbed all the biologists that I could find, and asked them that question: do you think that mice felt pain? Can mice feel pain? And what I found was that of the 13 that I was able to grab, 12 of them said of course they feel pain. One was unsure. But the rest of them did. So I think this view that scientists view animals as non-sentient creatures is in fact a myth. Well, that's just my 13 biologists. Sarah Knight actually did a study in England where they actually did a survey, and they asked people, they asked them about chimps, monkeys, dogs, cats, rats, and mice, and they asked them, do you think that  animals have various capacities: no capacity or human-like capacity? And this is sentient, the ability to feel pain and pleasure. 

And what they found was that scientists and laymen did not disagree. They both felt that all the animals could experience this. Not at human-like levels but at significant levels. There was one group that disagreed, and that was animal activists. And they didn't disagree on the bottom end, they were significantly different. They thought animals were more human-like than either laymen or scientists did. So there was a significance between animal activists and both laymen and scientists but no difference between those two. Charles Darwin was personally extremely convicted, not convicted, was conflicted over vivisection. In The Expressions of the Emotion in 1871 he wrote, "Everyone has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection who licked the hand of the operator. This man, unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life." However, three years later, he wrote a second edition of the book, and he changed the sentence. 

Vivisection was getting hot and both sides were courting Darwin. He was England's preeminent scientist. But both the pro and anti vivisectionists wanted his support. So what did Darwin do? He changes the sentence and he adds: "Unless the operation was fully justified by an increase in our knowledge." And then finally, the pressure got too great, and he had to come out in public. In 1881, Darwin sent a letter to the London Times in which he said, "I feel he who retards the progress of physiology commits a crime against mankind."  Darwin is ultimately responsible, in some ways, for the whole animal rights debate in the sense that he's the guy that argued that there's this fundamental continuity between anatomy and physiology between all species, including man and other animals. Well the problem is that continuity in biology and physiology also, as Darwin pointed out, means continuity in the experience of the emotions and intelligence and ability to think. So we can't draw that bright line that Descartes was able to draw anymore. Darwin erased that bright line. And so, scientists are in the situation that sometimes the more justified the use of a species is on scientific grounds, the more problematic its use is on moral grounds. This is essentially the issue that I think we oftentimes have to struggle with. 

The anti-vivisection movement came to the United States, and amongst the people that were targeted was John Watson. John Watson, those of you that are in psychology or psychology majors will remember as the founder of behaviorism. The idea that all creatures are basically creatures of habit, that our behavior is controlled by things like positive and negative reinforcement, simple forms of learning, etc, etc. And what Watson did, he did some Draconian experiments for his doctoral dissertation, and that they involved was taking rats and then removing their various sensory organs. So, he would remove their eyes. He would deafen them. He would make it so that they couldn't smell anymore, and then he looked at how that affected their learning. He was attacked by animal activists, what was the equivalent of animal activists at the time. And so, in the magazine The Nation they say, "this cruelty is so nearly purposeless as to be holy unjustified." And there's this cartoon that they published with that which shows Watson's vivisector's nightmare, which is he's chained down like that dog was and the rats are after him. They're taking his eyes out; they're turning him into an insane creature. 

The Victorian animal rights movement didn't last all that long. I don't know if you played with it or not, but you probably know that Google is in the business of digitizing, they want to digitize every book ever published. And they're making some headway, and this amazing tool called Ngram Viewer. And what Ngram Viewer is is a list of all the words and millions of digitized books. There's three billion words in their database. And you can type in words and you can see how it rises and falls in terms of usage in the language over time. It's an index of cultural popularity of an idea or a person. So, I typed in, this is a graph, the Ngram Viewer graph of the term vivisection. And what you can see, this goes from 1860 to 1960, and what you can see is the anti-vivisection movement really sort of peaked out at about 1880-1890. And by the time World War I was over, it sort of had petered out, and between the wars there wasn't much of an animal rights movement in the United States. 

1930 is a particularly interesting year. There wasn't much going on in the animal rights, and that was the year, let me mention one thing. While the Victorian animal rights movement was gaining in numbers in popularity, so was vivisection. So in 1881, according to British records, they began keeping records earlier than this, there were 200 dogs that were dissected in England. In 1910, there was almost 100,000 dogs dissected in England. So, in 30 years, the number of animals used in research grew tremendously. The reason seems to be the discovery of anesthesia. And so when people could anesthetize animals and use them for research, it made it more morally palatable for scientists to do this, and they did it in really, really large numbers. I mentioned that by 1930 the animal rights movement had pretty much died down. There wasn't much interest in that. 

And that was the year that Harry Harlow came to this university. And probably many of you have read -- work on Harlow. Some of the stuff that you're dealing with today goes back to when Harlow was here. He was at Madison from 1930 to 1974 when he retired. And I think the speaker in the series before me was Lori Gruen. She was the previous speaker. And she wrote a blog post about her experience here, and one of the things that she wrote in the blog post was the Harlow's early Maternal deprivation work at Wisconsin led to a national outcry. I don't see that. I've contacted various people about, did Harlow's work lead to a national outcry, and I am not sure that it actually did at the time. I talked to John Gluck, who was Harlow's last student, and John told me that Harlow was never attacked by animal activists as far as he knew and that wasn't a problem for him. 

Researchers in his own lab had some concerns about it. So, scientists had some concerns about it, but I don't think that, Lori also mentions that she thought the Harlow experiments were partially responsible for the establishment of the really important change to the Animal Welfare Act. I'm not sure that I buy that. After Harlow retired, Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation came out, and he devotes four pages to Harlow. And he takes him to task for the standard things that you hear animal rights activists talk about animal experimentation as cruel, repetitive, didn't show anything of interest, the work was contagious because other people began doing similar sorts of things at different universities. On the other hand, as a psychologist, I know the importance of some of Harlow's work in terms of changing my field of psychology, and my view is that Harlow's work actually was important and did have a major impact on psychology. Jonathan Haidt, you may have read his book The Happiness Hypothesis, writes in The Happiness Hypothesis, and Harlow was basically in many ways not responsible but his work was really important in changing that view of human and animal nature that John Watson had proposed the behaviorist view to get people to think that animals are actually creatures that think and that, specifically, fall in love. So Haidt writes, "How could doctors and psychologists not have seen that children need love as well as milk. The heroes in this story are two psychologists who rejected this central tendency of their training: Harry Harlow and John Bowlby." So, Haidt argues that Harlow was essentially a hero. Well, there were a number, I just want to quickly mention Harlow's work because it is so fundamental to stuff going on here in Madison now. 

One of the first important things that Harlow did was he basically showed that monkeys acted out of curiosity not just out of the need for food reward. John Gluck, his student, wrote, "Harlow described monkeys as having complex cognitive abilities that involved the existence of intentions, curiosity, and solution plans." So, this is not the standard view of the time. This was a major change in view in how psychologists saw how animals behave. His most famous in psychology for work that was done in the 1950s, the cloth mother/wire mother studies which for years were in every psychology book, every introductory psychology book. And basically it was this study in which he asked the question, why do infants fall in love with their mothers? And the prevailing view is that infants fell in love with their mothers because their mothers fed them. And Harlow did experiments showing that that wasn't true. In this case, it's the wire mother that has the baby bottle that's feeding the infant monkey. But who does the infant monkey go to when there's a stressor involved? It goes to the cloth mother even though it doesn't provide any food. In addition to that, he had the idea that these monkeys had this innate need, instinctive need for what he called contact comfort. The need to be held. 

The controversial stuff came later. And the so-called pit of despair studies, and I don't know if you can see it but in that metal well there's a little baby monkey that just looks terrible. He's hovering and huddling in there and is turned into a real mental basket case. And this severe isolation was a model for their development of depression. As far as I can see, there was no public cry about this, but there was concern on the part of the funding agency, the National Institute of Health, and there was some concern on the part of the university. In a letter that the NIH wrote to the dean of Arts and Sciences at the university here said, "The month-long confinement of monkeys in deep, wedge-shaped boxes gave the review committee cause for concern. Their use could make the primate center vulnerable to unfavorable publicity." Note they're not concerned about the monkeys, they're concerned about the image of the university to the public. Well, the modern animal rights movement I don't not think arose, it arose about the time Harlow left this university, not before that. And there were some things that caused it. There's a Life magazine article of a dog that was used in research in 1966, Peter Singer's groundbreaking book Animal Liberation, published in 1975, and the Silver Springs monkey case, which was responsible for, basically, the development of PETA as an activist organization that took things to new levels. 

And interest in animal rights grew dramatically since then. And since that time, since the mid-1970s, this debate has gotten increasingly divisive. And so, we have the activist view of animal researchers. This is PETA anti-vivisection with the cat with the wires hanging out of his head, and the caption says, "It's not the cat that needs its head examined." And over there you can see this, in this case they've reversed it. They've got an ape doing studies on a human, but you can see the fact that the ape doesn't really care, is isolated in his scientific rigor. On the other hand, you have the scientist's view of animal activists. By the way, that poster that says, "Thanks to animal research they'll be able to protest 23.5 years longer," the Foundation for Biomedical Research, I know that that poster is fake. I'm totally convinced that it's a fake. I would bet a lot of money that it's a fake. And you know how I know that it's a fake? I counted the people in the poster. 

There's nine men and one woman. In real life, what would there have been? There would have been nine women and one man. Study after study, including some of my own, have basically showed that 80%-90% of animal activists are women not men. So this angry man thing is a fake poster. James Jarboe testified for congress. He's FBI's Head of Domestic Terrorism. He testified before congress in 2002 and said the animal rights and environmental extremists are amongst America's most dangerous domestic terrorist threats. This is absolutely untrue. Anti-abortionists have killed eight or nine people in the United States. At least. 

As have white supremacists. So, for Jarboe to say that animal rights activists are the most dangerous terrorist organization, they don't compare to other terrorists, people that have views, other terrorists not associated with animals. The public has a problem when it comes to not just animal research but other forms of the treatment of animals. So, I was asked by a reporter one time, Dr. Herzog, are we a national of animal lovers? And I thought, well, how can we find out? And I thought, well, we could follow the money. Where does the money trail lead? And this is what I found out. Americans give about $3 billion a year to animal protection organizations. We spend, and this is a very hazy statistic, it's hard to get this statistic, probably about $60 billion. $60 billion on animal research. We spend close to $100 billion on recreational killing of animals through hunting and fishing. And we spend about $225 billion on the animals we eat. 

So, as a nation of animal lovers, we say we're a nation of animal lovers, we spend a hundred times more on killing animals than we do on protecting animals. The LA Times did a survey and asked people whether they agreed or they disagreed with the following statement. And the statement was: animals are just like humans in all important ways. And they found that 48% of people agreed with that. And I saw that and I thought that's crazy. Just like people in all important ways. That can't be true. So I thought, well, what I'll do is I will replicate that with college students. Which is what I did. So, I did a study of college students, and I had a bunch of questions about the use of animals, and I included this LA Times statement. 

Do you agree or disagree that animals are just like people in all important ways? And what I found, much to my shock, was that exactly 48% of my students agreed with that statement. Which, again, I find crazy. However, I was able to ask them some other questions as well. And this is how that 48% that said that animals and people were just alike, of those people, 40% said it was okay to use animal body parts if we needed them to save a human life, 50% of them said it was okay to use animals for experiments, and 90% of them ate an animal that they thought were just like people in all important ways. So we had this mismatch between our attitudes and what we actually do. To get some idea of the actual numbers of animals that we use, these are the best numbers I could come up with. They're in the right range. So these are billions of animals. In the United States we probably use somewhere between 20 and 30 billion animals for research every year. Hunters kill at least 100 million animals every year. 

Pet cats, how many of you have pet cats? Your pet cats, maybe not your pet cats, America's pet cats kill somewhere between a billion and three billion animals a year. And I'm absolutely convinced that the pet cats owned by animal activists kill more animals, vastly more animals than are used in all the research labs in the country each year. And then if we look at the number of animals that people eat each year, we're talking about 10 billion creatures. So, in terms of just the size of the bars, the animal research problem is considerably smaller than the problem of eating animals, the problem of hunting animals, and the problem of owning cats. In terms of specific numbers of animals used in research, these are the numbers that, these are accurate. These are from the federal government, covered under the Animal Welfare Act. Cats, dogs, primates, pigs, sheep, and you can see there's a couple thousand cats, maybe 8,000 dogs, 9,000-10,000 pigs, more primates than I would have thought, maybe 50,000 primates, some pigs, all together that adds up to about 160,000 animals. The problem is that rats, mice, and birds are not covered under that. So we don't know. We have a rough guess of the number. 

Let's say we use the low-ball end of the number. Let's say the 20 million animals that are used in research that are not covered compared to the small number that are. My point being that the animals that people get riled up about, which are primarily primates and pets, are a pretty small fraction of the animals that are actually used in research every year. There have been shifts in public attitudes towards the use of animals. Gallup poll does a survey every year. This is what their data looks like. Most Americans, unlike most Europeans, most American still approve of animal research. Roughly, 60%-65% approve of animal research. Although, that number is changing. Any time you're dealing with polling, you've got to realize that the wording of the polling can change the result. 

So, you get lower acceptance if you use the word testing or chimpanzees. You get higher acceptance of animal research if you use words like mice and AIDS. But, for the most part, Americans are split on animal research. Most women actually oppose animal research. Most men actually are for animal research. Okay, the scientists have a problem with animal research. The public's problem, inconsistency, crazy inconsistency. Scientists have a problem, and the problem is deciding if the research that you want to do is actually morally acceptable or not. Pat Dodson, a highly regarded animal scientist from England, basically made this cube. And what his cube says is that what's important is three variables: how important the research is, the likelihood of benefit, and the degree of animal suffering. 

And what he argues is if your study falls into the solid part of that cube, it should probably not be done. So, what -- argues is that the studies of low importance, you shouldn't do it even if it doesn't involve much. Even if it doesn't involve any suffering, it's not worth doing. If it has low benefit, it's not worth doing. And if it has a high degree of suffering, we shouldn't do that. But there's areas of gray, and that's that sort of middle ground. Now, the question is, how can we tell the degree of suffering? I'm a member of the animal care committee at my university, and this came up recently. One of my colleagues wanted to do a study, and his study involved mist netting birds, he studies sparrows, mist netting sparrows so the animals are caught, they're handled, he bands the sparrows, and then he takes a needle, injects it into the sparrow, not injects it in there, he takes a needle and he draw blood from the sparrow. It's a significant amount of blood, but not enough to permanently injure the animal. And the -- passed the study, but at the same meeting, we were interested in, we were also discussing changing our forms. 

And one of the forms that you have to fill out, that the university has to fill out, your university does, my university does, every university does, is how many animals are used in each of these pain categories. These are federally mandated. Category C is no pain or distress. Category D is pain and distress but relieved by appropriate measures. And category E is the bad one: unrelieved pain or distress. And I just thought, well, this would be interesting to see, do we all agree on this committee. So I asked three people. Fred, what category do you think it should be in? Fred says C. Bill, what category do you think it should be in? Bill said D. Suzy, which category do you think it should be in? Suzy said E. 

So we had three people on the same committee that each thought that one study belonged in a different category. So the question is, how good are scientists at deciding the importance of a study? Well, some years ago a woman named Rebecca Dresser did a study, and what she did was she made up protocols. And she had different universities' animal care committees evaluate the protocols to see if they would come up with the same decisions. And she found out was that they didn't do that. A social psychologist, Scott Plous, and I decided to replicate that research except we wanted to use real experiments at real universities. So it wouldn't be hypothetical; it would be real. So we were able to get money from NSF, support from the Animal Behavior Society, and what we did was a pretty simple study. It took three years of our lives. We were working on this thing constantly. But what we did is we were interested in do the same committees make the same decisions, and, within committees, how much do people agree on whether a study is worth doing? So what we did is we had 50 randomly selected university committees. 

We were able to, we had high recruitment rates because we were able to give each committee 400 bucks cash. They didn't have to go through the university bureaucracy. That's what they really liked. They could buy beer for their committee meetings if they wanted to. So we had really high degree of acceptance on that. And what each committee did was they gave us three proposals that they had evaluated, their last three proposals involving behavior. We blinded out all the stuff that would identify the university or would identify the people, and then we sent them to three other committees. And the three other committees made a decision on it, and then we also had the members of the three other committees independently evaluate various aspects of the study. So we were looking agreement between committees and within committees. We published the paper in Science, and the study has become quite controversial. 

The reason is that, just like Rebecca Dresser found, we found that there was really poor agreement within these committees. We found the second committee made a different decision than the first committee 79% of the time. Of 72% of the proposals that were approved as written by the first committee, only six were approved as written by the second committee. In the 17 proposals that were disapproved by the second committee, 16 had been approved by the first committee. So there was a lot of variation. In fact, we found there was almost no correlation between the two committees. Then, we incredibly, just like case I told you about in my committee, we found an incredible amount of disagreement within the same committee. We used a statistic called the interclass correlation. We found that, anything below .4 is considered poor agreement, we found poor agreement with the decision the individual members of the committees made. We found that they disagreed on the quality of these designs, the clarity of the proposals, the scientific value. 

They couldn't tell what was a good proposal and what was a bad proposal. They did agree on one thing: how much pain and suffering was involved. But other than that, their decisions were very, very inconsistent. This study has gotten a lot of attention by animal rights groups which tended to like our findings that the committees were unreliable. I, quite honestly, as an animal researcher, was surprised, and I was disappointed with our findings. However, they were consistent with a bunch of other research that have looked at the same thing. I still look back on this study and I was sort of disappointed. My hope, what we had hoped was that this data would spur other researchers and the government to come up with ways of making these committees work better and that absolutely has not happened. This paper is fairly often cited in animal rights circles, but it's been basically ignored by the scientific community. Even though the guy that was the head of the animal inspections of the USDA told me that he loved the study and he agreed with our results. 

I'm not particularly pleased that the study's been used. People can use the results of the study for anything they want to. I've been disappointed that this study has been used so frequently to argue against animal research. That was never my intention. However, it does suggest that the fox is guarding the hen house when it comes to animal care committee decisions. So what our argument was that more research needs to be done, not just with animal care committees but also with human committees. And this is a human study that was just in the New York Times April 11th. And this particular case was a study of premature infants. They were given different levels of oxygen. And the study was approved by 23 major university IRBs, institutional ethics committee boards, including Yale University, including Duke, including a lot of major universities. 

It turns out that, again this is the New York Times, "Babies assigned to the high oxygen group were more likely to develop eye disease and blindness; babies assigned to the low oxygen group were more likely to die." The problem was that how worthy did these committees actually do their job in terms of giving the parents consent for their kids to be in the study. And the government decided no they were not. And so the Office of Protection of Human Subjects wrote this letter to the researchers on March 27th. "We reviewed the consent documents approved by 23 IRBs and found problems with the consent form." And it's pretty clear that the consent form did not tell the parents that there was the possibility that their kids would be harmed by being in this study. So, my argument with this study, again, there's been a lot of controversy about this study. The idea is that there needs to be improvement in both human and animal care. There's also the legal problems associated with the use of animals. And the question is, you think you know what an animal is, it turns out from an animal care perspective, you probably don't know what an animal is. The Animal Welfare Act is very specific. It has a definition of an animal, and then it says, "This term excludes birds, rats of the genus Rattus, and mice of the genus Mus bred for use in research." So, if you're a researcher using that little deer mouse, that Peromyscus up there, in your research, you have to go through all the hoops of the government animal care procedures, the Animal Welfare Act. 

On the other hand, if you're using that little brown mouse, the Mus, you don't have to do that, according to the Animal Welfare Act, because they're not considered animals. That's why we don't know how many animals are used in research in the United States. There's also the category of special animals. Dogs, for example, are in the special animal category. So dogs are entitled, by law in the United States, to daily positive contact with humans. I think that means that dogs get petted. I'm not quite sure what that means. But cats are not so entitled to that. In fact, dead dogs are covered under the Animal Welfare Act. So a dead dog has more in the way of moral status according to our government than do live mice. 

And then, there's the wasted animals. And these are the animals I was shocked by when I was writing my book. I was interviewing a woman in Canada who was an animal caretaker. And I said, tell me how you spent your day? What'd you do today? She said, well, I started my day off by killing 50 baby mice. I said, why'd you do that? She said, oh, we do that all the time. I said, why? She said, well, we don't use them in the experiments. They're just sort of leftover. They're being used for genetic engineering stuff and they didn't have the right gene so we kill them. And I said, well, you mean like every day you're going in there? I said, well, how'd you do it? She said, well, we take handfuls of them, we put them in a plastic bag, we put a carbon monoxide tube in there, and we gas them. I was absolutely shocked by that. 

I didn't quite believe her, so I called the guy that I know who's the main lab animal vet at a major university on the west coast. And I'll change his name. I said, Bill, I just talked to this woman in Canada. She told me that they're gassing hundreds of mice every week. They're never used in experiments. They're just gassing them when they're six days of age. I said, do you guys do that? He said, oh, yeah, we do that all the time. And then he did the math for me. He's like, well, we do about 2,000 a week. I figured out at his university alone they are killing about 120,000 mice every year. 

And it turns out for genetic modification studies, genetic engineering studies, on average, about one in 30 animals will have the right gene. Then, in addition to that, males are a pain in the neck. They fight. They're hard to deal with and stuff like that. So a lot just kill all the males and keep the females in a lab. And this is one of the weird, dirty secrets that was in my book that I thought people would pick up on, and nobody actually has. It's really quite shocking. What we found, when Scott and I did the study on animal care committees, we actually did the animal care committee members a survey, and we said, do you think rats and mice should be covered under the Animal Welfare Act? And we found that, in fact, most people survey on animal care committees think that the government is wrong in their exclusion of rats, mice, and birds. We found that the overwhelming number of scientists felt that rats, mice, and birds should be covered under the Animal Welfare Act. Then there's the medical problem. 

Can we generalize from animals to people? And Carl Cohen in a major defense of animal research, wrote back in the mid-'80s, "Every advance in medicine, every new drug, every new therapy of any kind must be tried in a living being for the first time, and the subjects, if it's not an animal, is going to be a human being." Well, that's a pretty convincing argument for the use of animals in research. This is a study that was just published last week from the Kalin lab right here in Madison. And you can see the differing views of animal research by two different pieces that were written about the study. This study did not involve maternal deprivation or anything like that. It didn't involve killing any animals. It involved observing animals at various situations, finding out how anxious they were, and then doing scans of their brain, non-invasive scans of their brains to see if there were brain differences. And they found that there were. And they published the proceedings in the National Academy of Science, very prestigious journal. So it was a good piece of research from a technical point of view. Well, this is what the university press release said. 

"This line of research sets the stage for improved strategies for preventing extreme childhood anxiety from blossoming into full blown anxiety disorders." Sounds good. On the other hand, the Primate Freedom blog post said, "Clinical pediatric psychiatrists are unlikely to glean much from this latest, hyped up announcement that will help them with their patients. Where are the cures? Where are the preventions? They're certainly not hiding in Kalin's experiments on fearful, young monkeys." Same study, two totally different perspectives on it. So, how good are animal models for human diseases? If you call the Foundation for Biomedical Research, which is a lobby group for animal research, which I did, this is what they tell you. If it wasn't for animal research, we would not have vaccines for polio, we wouldn't have antibiotics, the list goes on and on and on. They sometimes quote this quote by Albert Sabin describing his work, the importance of animal research on the development of the oral polio vaccine. Polio vaccine is really interesting because right now we're on the verge of eliminating polio from the face of the Earth. I think 200 people got polio last year. It only occurred in two countries. One was Somalia or some place like that and the other place in Africa. 

So we're on the verge of ridding the world of polio, a disease that had killed millions and millions of people. Well, how'd that come about? According to the Foundation for Biomedical Research, it involved 9,000 monkeys, 150 chimpanzees, 133 volunteers. Without those animals, you would be at risk of polio, and you're not at risk now. On the other hand, the anti-research view is that animal studies are not generalizable to people. I don't know if you can read what that woman wrote on her back, but it says 92% of drugs that pass animal tests fail human safety tests. And there's some truth to that. And this is one of the things that surprised me when I was writing that chapter was that I uncovered a whole series of papers written by scientists on the failure, specifically I was interested in mouse models, of actually being good models for human disease. So, these were all papers written, published in scientific journals by scientists, not animal activists. Mice are lousy models for discovering new treatments for immune system disorders, ALS, traumatic brain injury, inflammatory diseases. So, what are the solutions? The solutions are, one solution is to just get rid of animal research all together which is what some animal activists want to do, but what some researchers say is that, no, the problem is we're using mice. 

What what we should be using is monkeys because monkeys are more like people than mice are. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts." He was wrong. And we see this in this debate. Animal rights activists have their facts, animal researchers have their facts, and they're completely different facts. They're completely different facts. And I think Andrew Rowan, who's a speaker in this series earlier in the fall I think, I think he got it right when he said, "Animal research appears to be neither quite as critical as some defenders claim nor quite as useless as some critics argue." So the philosophical problems, I'm not a philosopher by the way, philosophers know that immediately, they can tell, but they've helped me with my... I have what I call the ET conundrum. I call it that because it really hit me hard when I was watching ET. It was one rainy afternoon. I have twin daughters. 

They were little. I wanted to work on my article I was writing on the behavior of snakes, being an animal researcher, so I went out and rented the movie ET for my little daughters to watch. And I got sucked into the movie myself. So I put the paper aside, and I watched ET with them. You all know ET? You're familiar with it? Okay. So, at the end of the movie, it's a tearjerker, at the end of the movie ET's mom comes back to Earth to get her son. And there's this parting scene between ET, who's really, really smart, he's got that big brain and plus he's spiritually advanced because he can make dead flowers come to life and things like that, so he's got a bigger brain, he's more powerful, he's got a lot going on Elliott. So he looks at Elliott and he sort of croaks. Elliott looks at him, and he says stay. Stay here on Earth and play with me. 

We've had a great time in California. You'll love it here. And ET sort of shakes his head. And ET croaks to Elliott, he says in his little ET croak, he says stay. No, he says come. He says come. Come with me. And Elliott says no. And ET sort of sadly walks back into the alien spaceship and takes off. So, I'm thinking wait a minute, we could end this differently. 

So, being the cruel father that I am, I say to my daughters, hey, girls, what if it ended differently? What if ET reaches out at Elliott and he says come and Elliott says no and he grabs Elliott by the hand and then he starts pulling Elliott into the mother ship, into the alien spaceship, because he wants, on Zork there's an AIDS-like virus and humans are a good model for the virus. So Elliott's going to become part of the alien breeding colony, and they're going to inject him with diseases and use him like a lab rat. I asked my daughters, hey, girls, do you think ET should have the right to use Elliott for his experimental animal? And they said, no, daddy! How could you think such a thing? But it really got me thinking about it. It seems to me that our use of animals is based on the supposition that if you're smarter and more advanced, that gives us the right to use the dumber creatures, I shouldn't use the dumber creatures, the creatures with smaller brains, not as advanced, they should be able to use us for their research. Now, real philosophers have their own version of this, and it's called the marginal case problem. And the unfortunate fact is there are some people that are not as smart as some animals in real life. And so, for example, children that have anencephaly, they're basically born without a brain, they're not nearly as smart as that dog. Not even close. And the question is, should we use humans with anencephaly for our research instead of using that dog or a monkey or a chimpanzee? Now, my moral intuition, and my friend Rob Bass, the philosopher, wrote this. I actually stole this with his permission. 

I used word for word in my book. He says, "I cannot see a way to set the moral bar so high so that it's high enough to exclude all non-human animals, low enough to include all human beings, and be based on morally relevant traits." And I wrote to Rob, and I said, Rob, my moral intuition tells me that it's not okay to use anencephalic children for biomedical research experiments instead of animals. He wrote back and said, well, my intuition is just the opposite. And he genuinely believes, he's a really good person by the way, he's not a bad person, he genuinely believes that he's a strong animal rights activist and he really believes that yes, if we have to make these difficult choices, if we're going to be philosophically consistent, he can't see any way around not using the anencephalic kid. There's another philosophical problem: who is entitled to rights? And you may have heard Tom Riggin. He wrote one of the classic books, classic defenses of animal rights, the case for animal rights, and he says not every creature deserves a rights, but he says you do deserve rights if you are the subjects of a life which he says involves beliefs, desires, perceptions, memory, an emotional life, all these things. But the question is, how do we know which creatures have this? And the irony is that the answer is animal research. So we have to do animal research to find out if it's okay to do animal research. And I'll use, Chuck Snowdon's lab at University of Wisconsin recently published a paper on tamarins, these cotton-top tamarins have sophisticated problem solving. By the way, if you really want to feel dumb this evening after this thing, go and Google that chimpanzee. 

And what researchers in Kyoto have found at -- lab is that these chimpanzees have incredible numerical ability, much more than you do. I swear to God they do. They're smarter than you are. We know that because of research on captive animals that were kept against their will, kidnapped, put in the alien breeding colony and treated sort of like I'm going to let ET take Elliott. The philosopher, actually a lawyer, that's taken this idea most to heart is Steven Wise, and he wrote a book called Drawing the Line. And he said, well, what we should do is what we know about animals to actually figure out if they deserve rights or not. And so he did a lot of research in ethology, cognitive psychology, and he came up with what he calls a practical autonomy skill. Humans are at the top. They get 1.0 on his scale. Honeybees are down lower. 

They get .59. Chimps get .98. Gorillas get .95. You can see it going down the line. Dolphins get a .90. So they have rights. How does Wise know that a dolphin scores a .90? Well, he knows because there's a body of research on this. So how do we know how smart dolphins are? And this is what he says about dolphins. He says the dolphins concepts. They spontaneously understand pointing and gazing. 

They instantly imitate actions and vocalizations. All these are correct. They can use symbols. That's correct. All this stuff was figured out by a guy named Lou Herman who, for years, ran a dolphin institute at the University of Hawaii based on captive dolphins. Now, you would think that Steven Wise, who bases his arguments for animal rights, dolphin rights, on Wise's work, you would think he would like Wise. Not true. What he says about Wise, I mean Lou Herman, what he says about Herman is that Herman's research was unethical, that his dolphins were exploited, that he treated them like prisoners. So he has nothing good to say about this research except the fact that he uses the research to make his arguments that dolphins have rights. This raises an interesting question in philosophy. 

The ill-gotten gain problem. And I realized this was a problem when I heard my friend Jonathan Malcolm give a talk a couple of years ago. And my friend Marc Bekoff uses the same study in his book on the moral status of animals. And both of them use a study that was done in Canada at McGill University at the McGill University Pain Center by Langford et al. Now, what they did in this study was, the name of their paper was Social Modulation of Pain as Evidence for Empathy in Mice. So the message here is that mice experience empathy. Mice experience empathy so we shouldn't use them in research. All right, the paper was published in Science. It got a lot of attention. This is what they did. 

This is what they did in the study. They took mice, they would inject them with acidic acid in their stomach, small amounts of acidic acid in their stomach. That's called the writhing test. And they found that when the animals were in this situation that if there was another mouse present that was also having this test that they writhed more. They were in more pain. They suffered additional pain. But only if it was a cage mate, not if it was a strange mouse. So these animals had more empathy, if you want to call this empathy, to a mouse that they knew than ones that they didn't know. Now, they induced the pain by injections of acidic acid. They also injected formalin, which is very painful, into these animals paws, and then they put them on a hotplate to see how they would respond to a hotplate. 

Furthermore, what they did was that same experiment that Watson got pilloried for back in 1910. They did the same thing. What they did was they wanted to know what sensory elements were involved. So they got rid of the animal's sense of smell by injecting them with a series of injections of sulfate into their noses, which permanently wiped out their sense of smell. And then they made them deaf, and to make the animals deaf they had to inject them twice daily for a couple of weeks with this kanamycin solution, which basically permanently made them deaf. So I wanted to find out how many animals were used in the study because it didn't say in the Science paper. But they had an addendum on there. 34 pages, I went through 34 pages and I had to put in a spreadsheet to try and find out, and I'm still not sure this is accurate, but they used well over 800 mice to do this study. Now, what was the response of animal activists to this study? Because I would have thought that they would have really gotten their dander up. They loved the study. 

The Animal Liberation Front featured this on their web page. Mice experience empathy. No one mentioned the ethical issues associated with this research. I wouldn't have approved this research. So I called up both Jonathan and Marc Bekoff and said, hey, would you guys have approved this study if you were on the animal care committee? And they both said of course not. It would be a no-brainer. We wouldn't have approved it. So my question to them is like, okay, guys, is it okay for you to use studies that you think is unethical but you're using the results to show that the studies are unethical? So it's an interesting question. Then there's what I call the too much logic for me problem that philosophers have. Tom Riggin in his big old long book lays out this lifeboat scenario which Gary Larson capture nicely in this cartoon. 

You have three guys in a boat and a dog with a smiley face, and the caption is we drew straws, Larry, you lost. Larry has this horrified look because it's Larry that's going over. So, Tom Riggin says what should we do if we have four men and a dog in a lifeboat, Riggin, Mr. Animal Rights, argues toss the dog out. And he says the death of the dog would not be comparable to the harm that the death would be for any of the humans. And then a few pages later he says, well, what if we had a really big lifeboat? What if we had a lifeboat that would hold a million dogs? So we have a million dogs and four people and somebody's got to go. Much to my surprise, here's the scenario, there's a million dogs, the rights that he implies that special considerations apart, the million dogs should be thrown out and the four humans saved. A few pages later he gives the animal rights philosophy, what the animal rights view is on animal research. And he writes, "Those who accept the rights view will not be satisfied with anything less than the total abolition of the harmful use of animals in science, in education, in toxicity testing, in basic research." So, in other words, for Riggin, it's perfectly permissible to kill a million dogs to save four people, but it would not be permissible to kill four dogs to save a million people. If I have that right. And I'm still trying, he's a smart guy. 

I'm still trying to get my head around that. So, the psychology of the animal research debate. I'm going to close up here in a second. Public attitudes are fickle. People get bent out of shape about a few animals. This is the troubles that you're having here at the University of Wisconsin. You're using the animals that people care most about: primates and pets, particularly cats. I did an analysis of a case by the Animal Liberation Front, and what I found is that 95% of ALF attacks on scientists were to primate researchers and only 9% of ALF attacks were on researchers that use mice in their research even though mice are vastly more likely to be used than primates. Why does communication so difficult between scientists and animal activists? I'm going to turn here to social psychologist Roy Baumeister. And Roy argues that most of the evil in this world is not caused by fundamentally bad people. 

It's caused by some human traits that we all have to some degree. And one is called naive realism. The idea that you see the world as it is, and if other people see it differently, they're wrong. We tend to expect our own views. Second thing he argues is high self-esteem. We encourage self-esteem in our children. Baumeister thinks this is a problem. He thinks high self-esteem leads to bad things. And the other is moral idealism. That moral idealism leads you down a path that can be problematic, and I saw this. 

One of the groups that I've studied when I closed down my snake lab was animal rights activists. I went to animal rights administrations, I interviewed activists, interviewed in their homes, gave out surveys, stuff like that, and this is a sample of a little interaction that I had. I asked this woman Lucy: Lucy, do you ever have moments of doubt when you think it might be okay to use a pig heart to save a human life? And she answered, "No, I definitely have the sense that what I'm doing is right, and if you argue with me, I'm not going to listen because I know that I am right." Well, that sort of cuts down the conversation. We also had done some quantitative things on this. My colleague Shelley Galvin and I did some studies at animal rights conferences where we gave out a thing called the ethics position questionnaire. And, in this case, animal rights activists are in green, control groups of students are in red, and you can see the students were sort of all over the place when it comes to these various ethics positions. However, the animal activists were overwhelming in the absolutists position. Absolutists have low relativism. They tend to see the world in blacks and whites, but they're also very idealistic. If you do the right things, things are going to come out good. 

And they were really low. There was none of them in the subjectivist category, which is high relativism and low idealism. So, animal rights activists have a different moral orientation than the average person does. Along with moral clarity, there comes some problems. It can be a difficult life. Some people make good adjustments to this life, some people make less good adjustments. They have what I call the activists paradox. The greater your moral clarity, the harder it is to live up to your own ideals. Tricia and I were on the radio this morning, and a woman called up and she said she was a vegan and she didn't wear leather shoes, she didn't wear leather belts, she didn't wear animal clothes but she loved horses and she loved to ride. And that was a big problem. 

The problem wasn't riding horses; the problem was that saddles were made of leather and she felt really, really, really guilty about that. And I've met animal activists that have given up some of their favorite things in their life. Not just food but things like softball and baseball because they couldn't find balls or gloves that weren't made out of animal hide. I've talked to animal activists that were very bright, an IBM executive who didn't want to kill the ticks and fleas on her dogs and cats so she would take them off one by one and release them outside. People that felt guilty when they drove their car around because they found out that car tires had animal products in them. There's also social costs to moral commitment, that all the sudden you might find yourself at odds at a very basic level with people you love, your family, your husband, your wife, your best friends, and they don't understand you and they don't understand you anymore. And then there's compassion fatigue. One woman told me, she said, she sort of expressed this pretty well, "It dominates my life; sometimes I think I can't take it anymore so I say to myself I'm going to loosen the rope a little bit, I'm going to let myself not be Jesus for a minute and be a normal human being." And this was not unusual. Some activists I've met have done just the opposite. They've just been incredibly happy and they've sort of seen the light and they knew the truth and it was a very positive thing in their life. 

But for a lot of them, they live in a world surrounded by suffering. Then there's the violence problem. If you're really committed to something and you know that you have the right view, that gives you certain moral imperative perhaps, and that might be even to the extreme of violence. So, Jerry Vlasak, who is the press secretary, an ex-physician, ex-press officer for the Animal Liberation Front, wrote, I was in an interview in Australia, "Would I advocate taking five guilty vivisectors' lives to save hundreds of millions of innocent animals' lives? Yes I would." So, he's saying yeah, you should be willing to kill for your moral ideals. That's what the abortion activists have done. David Jentsch is an animal researcher at UCLA, and I interviewed him. He woke up one night to find out that his car had been fire bombed. His car was on fire in the middle of the night, and he lives in one of these LA suburbs. It's in the Chaparral where the whole neighborhood could have caught on fire. And he said if the fire department hadn't have gotten there on time, it would have burned the neighborhood down. 

But he regularly gets emails that go things like this: David Jentsch, I want all your children to die of cancer; I want you to watch them die; I hope you die a horrible death too. And my question is, what gives you the right, what gives someone the right to screw up somebody's life like that? There's a certain hubris involved in that but it also comes with moral clarity. I was thinking about this. I'd interviewed Jentsch and I was thinking about the connection between various types of terrorism, and what's the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? And I wrote my friend Gale Dean, who is an animal rights activists and who believes in what animal rights activists call direct action and what scientists call terrorism. And I wrote her: Gale, is there any difference between the 9/11 terrorist and the direct action ALF types who attack scientists? After all, both groups are completely convinced they have the high moral ground. And Gale writes back, this is all between midnight and one in the morning, "There's a big difference between groups that are convinced they have the moral high ground and the ones that actually have the moral high ground. [LAUGHTER] The difference lies in the truth of the matter." You get it. [LAUGHTER] How do you know the truth of the matter? Does this mean any whack job that wants to protect a tree has the right to, you know, kill? Now, we see examples of moral extremists on both sides of these debates. Joan Dunayer, whose book Speciesim got rave reviews in certain animal rights groups, wrote that "Even the least cruel non-human vivisection is as immoral as vivisection on Jews, blacks, mentally disabled humans, or any other humans." She also argues that if you're in a burning building and there's a puppy and a kid and you can only save one, you should flip a coin. And she says that seriously. 

On the other hand, Avery Morrison, animal researcher who's been attacked by animal rights activists, recently retired from the University of Pennsylvania, he has written, "A morality that does not treat people as worthy of special consideration, underlies the animal rights movements thinking and many of its actions. This morality leads inevitably to evil." Well, I've been thinking lately about similarities between the animals rights debate and the abortion debate. One of the things that happened to me when I wrote my book is I sort of changed my views on abortion. And one similarity is the fundamental difference and it has to do with moral status. What is a person? What are the attributes that give one rights? But the fact is that most people, most reasonable people are conflicted on these issues in ways that they oftentimes don't admit. Pro-choicers are uncomfortable with certain forms of abortion. And this came to me very personally, before I left the other day I was talking to my wife who's very pro-choice, and I said, Mary Jean, you're pro-choice on abortion, right? You think a woman should have abortion for any reason that she wants to. And she looked at me like I was crazy and said, yeah, of course. I said, so, you'd be okay with somebody having an abortion because they wanted to have a male child and they found out they had a female fetus. And she said, this is my wife who's very smart, she said no, I'm not comfortable with that. 

I said wait a minute, you just told me a woman ought to have the right to have an abortion for any reason she wants. Now you're having second thoughts about that. The same thing with people that are pro-life. Many people, I teach a human sexuality class, I do a lot of surveys on this stuff, many of my students that will tell you that they're pro-life if I said should a woman be forced to bear the child of a rapist or an incestuous relationship where you know that she's going to have a 50/50 chance of having a kid with a birth defect, do you think she should be forced to do that? A lot of people that call themselves pro-life will say no, that's a different thing. So, there's moral nuances here that oftentimes escape people. I've been thinking increasingly that these debates such as pro-choice and pro-life and the animal rights debate is based on a concept in psychology called sacred values. And what sacred values are deeply held beliefs that are non-negotiable. So I think, to some extent, the fact that this debate has become so bitter is because there are some things that people hold sacred. So, basically, even though the animal rights debate is a secularized movement for the most part, it still has a religious-like basis in these. And in both cases, animal rights and abortion rights, the stakes are high. 

I want to sort of end by asking the question: is communication possible? When Tricia asked me to talk here, she wrote me an email and she basically said, I said what's the purpose of this thing, and she laid it out nicely and brief. FARE was organized as a mechanism to improve communication and facilitate discussion between the university and community as a whole about the biology and philosophy of using animals in research. So the fact that you're here tonight is part way to dealing with this issue. Provost DeLuca in one of his memos at the beginning of this organization set out a series of questions I think are reasonable questions. I'm not going to go over them. Some of them are easily answered. Some of them are not very easily answered. And you guys right now at the University of Wisconsin are right on the cusp of this debate, and, for me, the question is, what's it going to be here? For you, is it going to be that or is it going to be that? Thank you. [APPLAUSE]