Comments on: Report: Animal Rights Conference – Part 3 http://speakingofresearch.com/2008/08/21/report-animal-rights-conference-part-3/ Improving understanding about Animal Research / Animal Testing Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:45:45 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Paul http://speakingofresearch.com/2008/08/21/report-animal-rights-conference-part-3/#comment-111 Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:16:04 +0000 http://speakingofresearch.wordpress.com/?p=259#comment-111 Andy, I think you’re right to an extent but the picture is a little more complicated than that. If you look at some anti-science movements you’ll find quite a lot of folk who are from the right of the political spectrum as well as the far left that we tend to associate with anti-vivisection. The anti-vaccination movement is a prime example of this where there is significant involvement of groups such as the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (a kind of right-wing equivalent to the anti-vivisectionist PCRM).

There is of course considerable overlap between the anti-vaccination movement and the anti-vivisection movement that goes back at least to the days of Dr. Walter Hadwen, the second chairman of the BUAV in the UK who also campaigned against germ theory and vaccination.

That said I think it’s fair to say there are probably more anti-corporate anti-vivisectionists, but there are also those for whom rejection of animal research is part of a more general rejection of what they would see as materialist, even atheist, science. The “alternative” medicine industry is another area where viewpoint from the extremes of right and left seem to coexist quite happily.

Finally I had to laugh at Hankins attempt to rebrand the pharmaceutical industry as the “drug industry”, presumably at some point in her life she has been to a drugstore!

]]> By: Andy http://speakingofresearch.com/2008/08/21/report-animal-rights-conference-part-3/#comment-107 Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:02:39 +0000 http://speakingofresearch.wordpress.com/?p=259#comment-107 Interesting that there is this bundle of beliefs (anti-corporate, anti-globalization) that goes along with being anti-animal research. You’ll probably find the same people opposed to biotech in food as well. The next thing looming is for the same people to get steamed about nanotechnology. It’s a sort of utopian agrarian marxism.

On the other hand, the people who oppose stem cell research, while they can be just as anti-science, tend to come from a very different ideological background growing out of the anti-abortion movement.

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