Facts and Figures

• Speciesism is the view that members of the species homo sapiens are superior to members of every other species simply because human beings belong to one’s own (the “superior”) species. For there is no “superior” species. To think otherwise is to be no less prejudiced than racists or sexists.

• It is important to realize that, although there is a basis for speaking of animals as having rights, that does not imply or require that they possess all the rights that humans possess, or even that humans possess all the rights that animals possess.

• The rights that animals and humans possess, then, are determined by their interests and capacities. Animals have an interest in living, avoiding pain, and even in pursuing happiness (as do humans). As a result of the ethical imperatives, they have rights to these things (as do humans). They can exercise these rights by living their lives free of exploitation and abuse at the hands of humans.

• People who support animal rights believe that animals are not ours to use for food, clothing, entertainment, experimentation, or any other purpose and that animals deserve consideration of their best interests regardless of whether they are cute, useful to humans, or endangered and regardless of whether any human cares about them at all (just as a mentally challenged human has rights even if he or she is not cute or useful and even if everyone dislikes him or her).

• Animal welfare theories accept that animals have interests but allow those interests to be traded away as long as the human benefits are thought to justify the sacrifice, while animal rights theories say that animals, like humans, have interests that cannot be sacrificed or traded away to benefit others. However, the animal rights movement does not hold that rights are absolute – an animal’s rights, just like those of humans, must be limited and can certainly conflict.
• Supporters of the animal rights movement believe that animals are not ours to use for food, clothing, entertainment, or experimentation, while supporters of the animal welfare movement believe that animals can be used for those purposes as long as “humane” guidelines are followed.

• Animals should have the right to equal consideration of their interests. For instance, a dog most certainly has an interest in not having pain inflicted on him or her unnecessarily. We are, therefore, obliged to take that interest into consideration and to respect the dog’s right not to have pain unnecessarily inflicted upon him or her. However, animals don’t always have the same rights as humans because their interests are not always the same as ours, and some rights would be irrelevant to animals. For instance, a dog doesn’t have an interest in voting and, therefore, doesn’t have the right to vote because that right would be as meaningless to a dog as it is to a child.

• Over a million animals (excluding fish) are used annually in research and teaching in Australia. Most are used in Victoria and New South Wales. The vast majority of those animals are subjected to some degree of pain and/or stress during the experimental procedure or as a result of the environment in which they are kept prior to and/or after the procedures.

• The 3 R’s of animal research originated in 1959. Reduction, Replacement and Refinement have long since been promoted to scientists in an attempt to reduce the suffering of animals in laboratories and are the central theme of the current Code of Practice: Reduction – to reduce the number of animals used to as few as possible; Replacement – to use alternative non-animal methods whenever they are available; Refinement – to refine all procedures to ensure that as little pain and stress is experienced by the animals as possible.

• Higher order animals are used in research, teaching and testing because of the benefits they bring to both animals and people. Those benefits are the reasons why a research, teaching or testing procedure is done in the first place (i.e. the aims of the work).

• As yet, there is no complete alternative to animal research. There is still an essential need to test drugs, medical devices and other promising treatments on some animals before they are tested on humans since even the most sophisticated technology models cannot mimic the complex cellular interactions that occur in a living system.

• Why animal testing is unreliable: results obtained in animal tests do not necessarily reflect the reactions of humans; results may differ from one species to another, and even one individual animal to another; for technical reasons results may vary from laboratory to laboratory.

• Test animals have to endure for long periods very irritating products that can’t be washed off. And the unpleasantness of having an upset stomach, with nausea and pain, hardly compares with what an animal must suffer when it is so badly poisoned that it dies.

• Animals are exploited and abused in many ways: in raising them for food and clothing; in entertainments such as rodeos and circuses; the killing of native and introduced animals; in testing cosmetics and household products; in scientific experiments of many kinds, including medical procedures and drug testing; and when companion animals are abused or neglected.

• Most eggs in Australia come from battery egg farms. Battery egg factories are a method of “farming” in which hens are crammed into tiny cages where they live out their short lives.

• It is estimated that about 80-100 million animals are killed by the clothing and fur trades every year.