Earlier this week I came across a news story that caused me to question myself in a way I haven’t for a long time.
The title of said story goes like this: “Painful truth is mice twist their faces in agony, just like humans”, and it goes on to describe how a team of Dutch and Canadian scientists have created a ‘mouse grimace scale’ for measuring the amount of pain a mouse is suffering based on its facial expressions.
Now, you may be wondering why reading this article has made me question myself. Well, I, like everyone else here as well as all our wonderful supporters, have thrown myself behind our unique OneKind campaign, whose primary purpose is to highlight the face that animals can think, feel, suffer and have emotions. The results of this particular experiment is yet more evidence which backs up our case, and the purpose of the experiment was reportedly to prevent the future unnecessary suffering of lab mice.
Yet the very idea of these particular mice undergoing the horrific procedures the experiment entailed, which included injections of acetic acid and mustard oil without any pain relief, breaks my heart and goes against everything OneKind stands for. Yes, it may in the long run help lab animals – but it’s caused nothing but suffering for these individual, sentient creatures. It would never be acceptable to cause such suffering to a group of humans for the purpose of improving the lives of other humans, so why is it acceptable to do this to animals?
However, what troubles me most about this issue, and this is a topic that has come up a few times for me in recent months, is why we need to prove against doubt that animals can feel. Why is the default assumption that they can’t, and why are people so often surprised when presented with evidence that they do? Biologically there are hundreds of striking similarities between human beings and the Earth’s multitude of other vertebrate creatures; comparatively we all function in much the same way. So if the human animal can think, have emotions, dream, feel pain, suffer, experience joy, why is the default assumption for so many of us that animals aren’t the same?
A few weeks ago I learned of an experiment back in the 50s in which a group of rats had to press a lever to reach food, yet doing so caused another group of rats in a next-door cage to suffer an electric shock. The rats simply stopped pushing the lever, preferring to go hungry rather than see their neighbours suffer. The sole purpose of this test was to see if rats had empathy. I find a deep and sad irony in the idea of a human being deliberately inflicting pain and starvation on a group of innocent creatures to find out if they have the empathy that we call a human characteristic. So often we are surprised to learn that an animal has something of a conscience like us. Yet paradoxically, one of the striking differences that really can be found between people and animals is the extreme rarity of finding an animal that will inflict pain and suffering on another for purely arbitrary reasons.
Examples such as these will reluctantly yet undoubtedly go into the OneKind archives, adding to our enormous portfolio of evidence that animals are sentient beings. Yet what we hope is that as the concept of OneKind grows and spreads, the perceived need for such experiments will disappear. Not only would OneKind world mean animals suffering less at our hands, but also a greater recognition of our similarities; and that’s not just about how like us animals are, but also how like animals we are. Just as animals have been shown to grimace, mourn and empathise just like people, so too are people capable of loyalty, affection, intuition... just like animals.
In response to all this, my simple pledge is to stop feeling so amazed when animals display ‘human’ characteristics, and keep reminding myself and those around me that it’s a no-brainer. What will you change today to work towards OneKind world?