Vivisection: the next 10 years (vegan / vegans / veganism)

hey what's up I find it difficult to be
concise but what I'm trying to say in this particular video a lot of what I discuss on this channel really deals with the difficult contrasts between simple questions of principle and the more complex murky questions we get into when we force ourselves to think about what's practical what's possible in our lifetimes what differences can we make in the next 10 years I think those things are really worth dwelling on even when they show up contradictions and paradoxes and by contrast if we don't think about that if we just make declarations of unattainable things without thinking about the the details then we become laughable both to our supporters and to our detractors there are many many protests in the United States these days just the last couple of years sort of extreme student protests on American University campuses that we're making demands their universities couldn't possibly help them with you know screaming outraged protests at the universities like they want their professors to somehow eliminate rape anti-rape protests but what are you actually asking the university to do what is the possible and practicable solution you're proposing here you know if there is something the university can do then the the protest isn't so ridiculous protests about status of black people in the United States now again okay maybe a very good cause you may really want to improve the status of African Americans and you know obviously they've been terrible scandals but police brutality protesting at the police station is one thing calling for specific police reforms may be very meaningful but when you look at a protest which is just kind of attacking the administration of the University that's something very different so what what are you actually asking the university to do and what do your university professors have to do with it um you know your university professors are not the commissioners of the police department they're not the provincial government of the state government even when the message has some meaning you often see these protests that are just sadly out of place and again they become laughable not just to their detractors to their opponents but they're laughable even to people who would support them like there are people who would like to see the quality of policing improved the quality of black people's lives improved and so on and for sure there are there are many many examples of that kind possible I think I've mentioned recently on the channel this issue of anti-israel protests on American University campuses you know if somebody had a protest in front of Bill Clinton's house I assumed Oh Clinton lives in a house i don't know maybe he lives in a condominium maybe you could demand that bill clinton in his retirement could do more for the palestinian peace process but like he almost in case whatever the University of Ohio or something what do you want the professors at the University of Ohio to do you know it's it's not possible it's not practicable and you're discrediting yourself because you've never dealt with these murky and difficult issues that separate a simple statement of principle from these questions of implementation so you make yourself stronger more meaningful more salient more respected by descending into those details and by admitting the limits to what you can do and what the government can do if it's the government you're asking to change you may be asking normal people change you may be asking McDonald's Corporation change you may be asking for some other kind of social change now the second thing I want to mention here is that vegans start in a weak position because um haha we haven't made anything obsolete there's a saying people like to kick around the Stone Age didn't end when people ran out of stones it's when you have something better than the existing technology you can make it obsolete you can really offer a better alternative vegans are making an argument that they want people to do the right thing because it's the right thing to do not because they can replace the wrong thing and nowhere is this more evident than in the case of vivisection vivisection it's much more difficult to argue the ethical case against div accession than to argue against eggs chicken eggs chicken eggs are unhealthy we don't got to make them obsolete they're terrible for your health you don't need them you should need them they have cholesterol etc nobody should eat chicken eggs it's also an ethical issue it's also an ecological environmental issue etc but that's really quite an easy one to argue I was in England when there were protests in the streets that were pro vivisection pro animal experimentation and they had people coming out making quite powerful speeches saying that this type of science save their lives and we're not in a simple position to say as vegans well we have a better alternative there's no need to torture monkeys in a laboratory because we have tofu doesn't work that way and it's actually hard I'd love to see someone like a natural vegan really come out and admit where she stands in for the session I think anyone who's done the reading on the one hand is aware of the horrors truly awful horrors of what goes on in laboratories all around the world in secret and for profit it emphasizes those two points atrocities being committed in secret and for profit there's a Wikipedia article I think on a set of experiments that are known as the pit of despair experiments torturing monkeys and it they couldn't have proven anything they couldn't have discovered anything it's not to find the cure for cancer there's no justification that kind amazingly cruel experiments on animals just in the name of psychological research we're really if you rid the original proposal for the experiments they couldn't have discovered anything i have read accounts critiques of experiments where they were torturing animals to death a member of set where they were breaking the necks of lambs and it couldn't have proven anything about human health it was just ridiculous I mean and you know at the end the conclusions of the lab report after the torches animals that was like well we didn't really learn anything I guess this was a badly designed experiment you know you know the notion of necessity as it applies to animal research is deeply flawed nevertheless when you're looking into it it's not the case that we can say in a simple and glib way well animal rights are universal therefore all experimentation should be abolished everyone should do what I say because I'm right and the fact that I'm less than 1% of the population who knows about this and cares about this doesn't matter either the fact that the fact that I'm a tiny minority for a totally unpopular movement that has zero credibility that doesn't matter either we're just going to demand this and keep on demanding it and not think through any of the implications and if people point out that the progress of science relies on these things we have no answer except to say it's morally wrong and I can't replace it it's not like the Stone Age ending because we've got iron and bronze and steel no no no we want to end all scientific progress of this kind just because it's the right thing to do now a more mature position is to say look I recognize that animal experimentation has gotten some results it's horrible it's terrible to admit but as vegans even though we can show examples of horrendous scientific experiments the tour channels that for no good reason the other side will have examples of experiments that found really meaningful and important results including some of the results that support a vegan diet by the way where they're torturing animals and finding that a vegan diet is healthier than a meat-based diet many of you if you read these kinds of scientific studies you'll be you'll be familiar with those those contradictions in line but you know we can't just say you know the Stone Age ends when there's no need for stones anymore we can't offer a simple superior substitute for what the infrastructure of animal exploitation now offers through vivisection so it's actually very difficult to think about and talk about now I compare this to two examples that I think are radically unfamiliar to vegans because vegans have just been kind of playing these games I think ethically it's very problematic to have a private for-profit company generating nuclear power running a nuclear power plant I'm not against nuclear power nuclear power can be okay it can be a good thing it also has some terrifying ecological implications but if we accept that we're going to live in a world with more than zero nuclear power I do not think it's acceptable to have private for-profit corporations running those nuclear power plants and the example of what happened at Fukushima Daiichi that is doubtless in large part you know due to the weakness of government oversight it also illustrates the terrible seemingly insoluble problems with having a private for-profit corporation running a nuclear power plant at all if this needs to exist if there's a question of necessity why can't it be a charity gambling this is number two some people just feel the gambling is a simple absolute ethical issue in the same way vegans feel animal rights are an ethical issue and so therefore there should be no gambling but the more nuanced and complicated reality of what we deal with is that there will always be gambling there will always be more than 0 gambling even if the government declares it completely illegal and different countries around the world including Canada during my youth come up with peculiar halfway solutions of saying look let's separate the profit motive from gambling let's disallow private for-profit companies from gambling but let's look at permitting charities to run casinos which used to happen in Canada and my youth churches used to play blackjack used to be serious like that at the church down the street they'd be having blackjack tables and this kind of casino gaming as a fundraiser you know because somebody got cancer they're raising funds for something and then of course the government was operating its own casinos which was a corrupting influence of the government and over time there were more and more casinos and the matter principal was eroded away nevertheless I think that's also worth thinking about haha it's not easy to just say well nuclear power is bad so let's abolish nuclear power but you can limit some of the evils and in competence of human nature by saying let's separate this from the profit motive there's no way to eliminate gambling in society hundred percent but you can have laws that say let's try to limit the pervasive influence of gambling in society by trying to separate it from the profit motive uh now ultimately I don't actually know this happening with tobacco so much I it probably has had with tobacco in some countries but with alcohol there have been many many attempts to separate alcohol from the profit motive to have some kind of government monopoly on alcohol control the distribution of alcohol limit the advertising of alcohol to have non profit shops controlled by the government instead of for-profit businesses selling alcohol so my again Ontario where I grew up it was also an example this in my childhood and before I was alive one of my very elderly professors he told some hilarious stories about what the the alcohol Control Board was like in his youth at one time it was a you know this kind of completely soulless bureaucracy and it was part of a government effort to try to make alcohol an unattractive nonprofit sort of enterprise to decrease the what was then a real huge problem of alcoholism in Canada now again this also just became corrupted over time and now more and more countries even where government is involved the alcohol industry resembles a for-profit operation uh what's attainable in our lifetimes I'm against vivisection I I would love to see vivisection eliminated one hundred percent if you present me with a law that says from now on each and every example of the accession each project each experiment has to be presented to Parliament has to sit before Parliament for two months and then get voted on by Parliament I would support that law that's not abolitionist law that won't end vivisection but that would massively rationalize vivisection right and it would limit the two factors I mentioned that this is happening in secret because it would make it transparent and you know that anyone in the press can write an article about that anyone can examine it anyone can write to their member of Parliament's right to their member of Congress all right it would limit the secrecy and it would also limit the for profit motive right if the justification for torturing a monkey to death is necessity is that it's going to cure cancer that it's going to have some amazing positive benefit then why can't we have a democratic publicly accountable process that actually questions that necessity where there is a case to be made publicly and transparently where someone has to justify why this monkey is going to be tortured to death again if you look up this stuff will give you nightmares if you look up something like the Wikipedia article on the the pit of despair experiment horrible experiments that have happened in the past torturing monkeys torturing cats or whatever where nothing could possibly found it's very obvious that those worst excesses would not survive the public scrutiny of having the case made to Parliament even if nobody in Parliament cared if the newspapers could look at it and the animal rights people could look at it and people could laugh at the worst proposals that would change things even the process for the laboratory let's say it's a research laboratory University even the process of them having to come up with the justification then having to make their case this would already limit vivisection this would enforce a rationale from the section and as I've been hinting at I think it would be tremendously meaningful to pass a law saying look all vivisection every stage has to be completely non profit and you can even limit the salaries of the individual people involved are you get into another story about that transparency and salaries can be very powerful thing in political science is this would be much too long if I get into that also but to really try to eliminate the profit motive from it's okay if this is done for medical necessity only then why can't we have a democratic process that puts those questions of necessity on trial on a case-by-case basis obviously this would exponentially reduce the amount of vivisection in any one country and those of you have experience working side universities the profit motive in the bureaucratic context to university has bizarre effects on people you have a department where the head of the department says okay this is how much lab space we have so we need to write 30 funding proposals this year so the professors are a son test you guys have to come up with 30 proposals for experiments doesn't matter if they're stupid and out of those 30 proposals we expect that maybe seven of them will get funding will get support and we've got to do as many experience possible we've got to justify the budget for the department we have to have enough lab work going on to keep our masters students busy we have a bunch of targets for a bunch of reasons that are ultimately financial and completely meaningless research is being done all the time just to satisfy those economic and bureaucratic goals and you can see that in the Department of Anthropology you can also see it in departments of ecology and you can see it in departments of the hard sciences so sadly you know the structure of funding the economic factors how they shape even academic research is very powerful thing and of course once you get into the pure profit sector pardon me the pure private sector pursuit of profit things can get even uglier and we do have animals being tortured to death to make a redder shade of lipstick now what I've talked through in this video will be shocking to many and most my point is yes I'm interested in a one hundred percent elimination of vivisection but I'm interested in seeing results in my lifetime I'm interested in really talking through what kind of legislation could happen before I die or in the next ten years so you just want to make a statement of principle that although the session is evil I really don't want to hear it I want to hear what you can do about it I don't want to be right I want to win being right is easy you want to sit in front of your camera on the internet and be right well clap clap clap we can all applaud that you can have a little circle of people around you who send you fan mail and applaud what you're saying and say wow you're so right be so easy for me to come on here and say the same BS everyone else says in the internet and get my applause and get my tiny measure of fame and whatever I'm not interested in being right I don't want to be right if this video offends you because you're an ethical vegan and all you want to do is demand the total abolition of vivisection I feel you go ahead be offended but when you've calmed down you're not offended anymore think about what you and me can actually do in the next 10 years okay what I've just said it may be wrong I don't mind being wrong I don't want to be right I want to win I want to make an actual difference in the real world for those monkeys that are in actual laboratories having experiments performed on them for the sake of dentistry for the sake of a redder shade of lipstick for some psychological experiment that's complete BS ethically and morally I agree there is no such thing as necessary torture as justifiable torture but if you think that a tiny minority of despised people can snap their fingers and make the right thing happen just because it's right you're dreaming wake up get organized look at the real world factors think about real-world legislation that can make a difference in your country wherever you're living right now and just by orienting your discourse towards those attainable goals you will avoid being a laughingstock you will avoid being despised and sneered at both by the people who disagree with you and the people who agree with you in the way those University protesters were because you will increasingly articulate your goals in relation to real world problems and you will be offering meaningful solutions I wish we could just make meat and dairy agriculture obsolete but we can't I wish we could just make the scientific experimentation on animals obsolete but we can't what we're looking at is a period of history where we have to have complex disincentives to try to marginalize the exploitation of animals to try to engage the public in some kind of productive discourse about improvement of the status of animals on planet earth and look man how do we put a man on the moon was it by holding protests in the streets and pointing at the moon and saying I want to get there right now no okay there's a terribly convoluted and complicated process there's a series of stages in between and if you're immature about it then ultimately you're just a madman pointing your finger at the moon saying that's where I want to be