Vivisection, an Insider's Perspective (Vegans in Lab Coats?)

now I have several prior videos in this
and I do not want to become the guy who talks about vivisection on YouTube however in 2016 I may be the guy who talks about the section it's hip open I mean other vegans just do not tackle this or do not deal with in a sincere way that admits of the complex gray areas and overlapping and kind of moral jurisdictions this is gets you into it's easy for us as vegans to say people should stop eating meat because they can eat tofu but if you do the research it is not so easy to say we should stop doing original scientific research because we have tofu tofu tofu cannot render the dermis absolutely ivana skin just you know create a fairly popular vegan youtube channel and then sit back and wait for someone also the contact to you it's pretty easy as the ballast CL recommended in one of his billions of above us yen I would boasted here but I don't know which one to videos it's too many hey what's up guys one of the first things I've said on this channel because I think it's a really useful challenge to the political and organizational conceits that many vegans have was that if you want to tackle vivisection you have to cooperate with people who disagree with you you have to be able to cooperate with people who are insiders in the system including people who actually conduct scientific research themselves they're the people who know what you need to know they're the crucial partners you've got to have on board if you're gonna make a difference in the real world and I got a letter I got fan mail in effect from a guy who is an insider who is conducting biological research including some experiments that exploit animals now in my prior videos I alluded to the crucial role that moderate people can have in these debates and by moderates I meant scientists who do torture animals to death um but who are interested in minimizing that torture so those would be people who are not vegan but who share with vegans the concern that some of the animal research is unnecessary ie that the whole experiment isn't necessary or that the particular suffering caused by the design of the experiment is necessary people who see the moral value in trying to minimize the evils of vivisection pardon me but people who are not abolitionists or who are not calling immediately for an end to all such scientific research of course one of the reasons for that is that they are very local people who see see the value in it who know about particular experiments that have had a very positive and important outcome that have discovered important things in the world now I have several prior videos in this and I do not want to become the guy who talks about vivisection on YouTube however in 2016 I may be the guy who talks about the section I mean other vegans just do not tackle this or do not deal with it in a sincere way that admits of the complex gray air and overlapping kind of moral jurisdictions this gets you into but I was just saying to open this video I really started talking about this issue on this channel I think more than a year ago now but when it what first times I talked about it I talked about it explicitly in terms of the importance of being able to listen to and communicate with and cooperate with people who do disagree with you people are on the other side people who are insiders and the letter I got is from an extraordinary insider because he is at least vegetarian and he's vegan or semi vegan and he cares Jay manly about animal rights whatever you want to say minimizing harm and suffering caused animals but he continues to part of the system so he he sent me this fan mail in response to my most recent video on the topic through the session the next 10 years um and his perspective is frankly and valuable it's tremendously important even if you disagree with it so a significant part of this video is going to be me reading out his letter I'm also going to provide a link below this video to my blog we can get the the full text of the letter I got his permission I checked it was already to do that many of you may be offended or may be surprised that I even refer to this guy as the vegan and say well how can he be a vegan if he tortures animals to death in a laboratory I think the opposite question is worth asking how can you not be if you're engaged in torturing animals to death in the name of science wouldn't any really rational deep thinking person respond to that by engaging seriously with the ethical questions raised by veganism like I realised this guy's extraordinary but it's worth asking why is this not ordinary why is this not more common and one would hope that in the future there will be more examples of people who are in this kind of gray area they care about the issues they care about the outcomes they care about the harm being done to animals and these would be the very few people who has insiders in this industry as insiders in this area of academic research could really cooperate with advocates for animal rights to make political changes happen and sorry get a I'm not subset Informer videos but one of the reasons why they're so critical is that they understand the process they understand the procedures how they work how they don't work what have you if you get offended by this as a vegan get offended calm down come back watch the rest of the video think about how you can really make a real difference in the real world because getting offended doesn't help anybody and there's a crucial sentence about halfway through this letter where he says I agree with you ie agrees with me and that is in reference to my earlier video when I said that legal changes should be made he says to make animal research more difficult to create more more more barriers more obstacles to exploitation animals and labs being being approved what-have-you now I will just clarify my position is not even difficulty I mean he admittedly difficulty as part of it but I mean if it were just bureaucracy if it were just a bureaucratic delay if we were just paperwork or was just fees it was just money being paid that companies had to pay thousands of dollars for each rabbit that to me would be meaningless what to me is really interesting or questions of transparency public accountability and democratic procedure and that's why in my earlier video I used the examples I did of the proposals being put before Parliament and where for a few months they could actually be debated by the press debated by the public at large and obviously they'd be debated by people like this guy I see no sincerely interested parties within the scientific community within the scientific research community I should say academics experts in the industry but we're also you know animal rights advocates would have their their chance to stand up and make their pitch what-have-you so I think I'm in the earlier video I put great emphasis on transparency public accountability and democratic process it is true that you can see that as just a a barrier as something that delays and limits and makes more difficult research that involves experimentation animals but the difficulty for me is not an end in itself okay so let's get this train wreck rolling hello eyes'll he writes I've thought about mailing you for a while and never got around to it but your recent video vivisection in the next ten years made me think of a couple points I'd like to share with you I'm a recent graduate working in comparative immunology and about to start a PhD in global health at a major UK university I've been vegan for just over a year and was vegetarian before that a few years ago and went on a four day training program on murine slash mouse experimentation and was about this time I went vegetarian period so again I ask the question this is rare this is extraordinary but in a sense we should wonder why why is it rare why is it extraordinary you know I'm tempted here to add some some autobiographical reflections but I mean if anything on earth is going to make you pause and reflect philosophically on the contradictions within our culture of of animal exploitation it might indeed be a an experience just such as this one I was already thinking about that stuff when I was a high school student to say I could I could I could reflect on that both in terms of lab work and in terms of look okay we're not gonna make this this particular video we're not gonna make about me all right let's let's keep the guy doing the training was Vance was vastly experienced in animal research having worked on everything from rats to pigs to dogs and spent the four days delivering material on anesthesia a minor surgery euthanasia animal behavior etc although he had not trained formally as a biologist I II started out as a young animal technician and worked his way up I was amazed at how much he knew about animals on the first day he gave an introductory talk that touched on perspectives regarding animal research and to my surprise he actually touched on the hypocrisy of meat-eaters who are against animals killed for research sorry pardon me who are against animal research I've attached the graphic he used in his station which shows the magnitude of animals killed for food versus animals killed by cats and animals killed for research this really made me think deeply about my carnivorous diet and shortly after I came home I went vegetarian although it was a little while before I went vegan I'm still grateful to this guy for making me realize whether he meant to or not that I could no longer justify my decision to eat meat in your video you made some interesting but generalized points about how animal research is regulated I can only speak for the UK but I'm guessing this is okay as you have both experience living here and some knowledge of the university system in this country it's surprisingly difficult to obtain a license to work with vertebrates in the UK it's an expensive bureaucratic time-consuming process which is administered by an arm of the government the home office to gain a license to perform an animal experiment the P I must justify completely that the experiment cannot be achieved with any existing in-vitro method furthermore we have a framework known as the 3 R's replacement reduction and refinement if you cannot demonstrate evidence of these 3 R's in your proposal your experiment won't happen and trust me many if not all biologists would love to have in feature replacements for animal experiments working with animals is an ethical demands fiddly surgical procedures and can yield unpredictable results I work in an invertebrate lab no licensing is necessary to work with our animals shellfish and for this reason researching highly conserved immunological processes and animals like bivalves which lack a central nervous system is becoming more popular I pause now already for me there were interesting problems raised by this what he is saying here partly confirms but partly challenges what I have read basically in animal rights publications basically people who are animal rights advocates their perspective on this same bureaucratic system is different from what he says now obviously I do not believe he's lying to me and I also do not believe that the animal rights publications were intentionally lying to me the probably just reflected you know an outsider's view versus an insider's view etc in some ways this guy will have more expertise but in other ways he won't in my prior video I just offhand provided some worst case examples he will link to a really notorious set of experiments called the the pit of despair experience and so on now animal rights activists may know a lot of examples of that kind they may be able to offhand provide worst case examples whereas someone like this will know the particular projects he's been a part of maybe projects friends a visit home about through word of mouth he may know typical examples he may know exemplary examples we know very positive examples where the process really worked but he would not have studied worst-case scenarios as much as an animal rights activist and both of those things entail a certain kind of bias one of the really interesting samples of that from elsewhere in the social sciences you know we had a problem in in Canada with feminist groups who in in their studies above the legal system worked they had only been studying the most extreme examples of police failing to deal with domestic abuse you know violence within the home and they were giving this advice to the government and to police they were doing education sessions for police and a schools that were really misrepresenting everything it was like being based on like serial killer less than one in a million type examples that's that's an important area of study in itself but informing public policy you need to understand the whole range like police need to understand that more than 90% of the time when they get a domestic abuse call they're gonna show up with that was this is Canada like in Canada more than that ever since I'm gonna show up at the house and the husband and the wife are both drunk and sad and just screaming at each other and the neighbor called the police because they're making too much noise and you know the role of the police may be as little as separating them and saying look you got to calm down and the next and the next day even things are gonna be fine boring middle-of-the-road cases like that police need to be prepared for that if you're providing them only with training and you're writing laws that treat every scenario as a worst case scenario that can be a terrible form of bias so look I just say my approach to this is very different because I approach it from a political science perspective not from a biological science perspective but I mean to me again this is interesting this is why the different parties need to work together for me also even though I am aware because the articles I've read included these these frameworks the 3 R's framework the the bureaucratic procedures dimensions I have read analyses of them however the analyses I read indicated to me that they are in no way transparent there are no way publicly accountable that they do transpire in secret which for me is problematic because when they fail then we don't know when we can't quantify it so one article I remember which was a group in England so this exact same framework it's partly an EU framework it's partly a British Pacific framework where they were challenging the statistics given to them by the government they said well look you promised this policy was going to reduce the number of animals being tortured but actually the numbers are increasing here are the stats we have the stats they had they got from the government and the government just wrote back briefly saying well the stats have increased but you know they're mostly rats so don't worry about it and then this group this animal rights group was in the position saying well can we have the actual statistics like if that's your excuse how many of them are rats how many of them are monkeys and they couldn't get the numbers they wanted so in terms of transparency and public accountability that's a very simple example you know it was insufficient and that's a very basic form of statistical knowledge they wanted to actually have project details public transparent publicly accountable before the experiment happens that to me would be a paradigm change ethically and morally where it would possible for people to to look at a project and say well you know including colleagues in the field because like you know there will be people who are lifelong primate researchers they're people been doing vivisection on Apes their whole career and even though from my perspective those people may be may be morally evil I think that really you know you may you may really regard someone as morally evil still that may be the person who has the expertise to look at a proposal and say you know this is this is really kind of pointless this particular experiment can't be justified scientifically or ethically or morally that discourse those debates happening before the research is approved not after when it's too late not when it's published that to me is is is a big change and I mean in a sense yeah is there not philosophical or abstract debates right they they have to happen before the animals actually it tortured to death etc and again look I'm just gonna pause here to say there are vegans who'll be offended that I'm not just taking the simplistic abolitionists position of saying well all of this research has to stop and has to stop tomorrow because I say so it's humbling to recognize that you live in a democratic society where you're in the minority even if you think you're ethically right even if you think you're you're minority is is correct or ethically better off than aside I have to recognize I I'm basically pro-democracy back in the year 2002 if there were a referendum a democratic process to ask if people wanted to start a war I in the aftermath of September 11th 2001 there's no doubt Democratic almost every Western country was willing to start a war after September 11 2001 now it is deeply problematic to me that virtually none of the countries actually had a democratic process that is also really worth questioning why do we start wars as such an undemocratic way however even when we think democracy and transparency and public accountability are tremendously important criteria we also have to recognize the bloodlust and indifference of the public that you know after September 11th 2001 if there was a public vote in the matter I think the majority of the population is safe they would have started a war with anybody they didn't care whether it's Iraq or Afghanistan or any other you know the and if there had been a referendum on the budget for the war for how many years it was ten years of war at that moment the public was was really mobilized to be very Pro or now the other thing I find interesting about that is that repetition changes the situation profoundly being asked a question for the second time is never the same as being asked the question for the first time and like with the war in Iraq okay if the whole public would have approved of it in 2002 if they would have gotten that that vote what about 2007 what if you asked question again now it's different right now it's been going on for five years already you know now the public is asking different questions now the issues of accountability and so on are hard to make and again obviously looking back like the Vietnam War many people don't realize that when the United States first got involved the Vietnam War there was positive support for it even if quiet but again if you were asking the public that question every five years if you had a referendum every five years as the Vietnam War progressed American public opinion gained a level of scrutiny and re-evaluated the short term and long term outlook for that so I just say uh having a truly democratic public accountability accountable process pertaining to animals petition research I have no doubt that many projects would be approved but that would create a stark divide okay are you going to torture a monkey to death to allegedly find the cure for cancer and is that claim credible and a public scrutiny look at whether or not this research is is legitimate or that's one thing but you would immediately see the disappearance of torturing an animal and monkey to death just for psychological research which we have had a lot of in the Western world again I mentioned that in the earlier video had a link to an example but like the psychological experiments like you're just torturing animals death to see how miserable they are afterwards really that is not an exaggeration you can look into examples that will give you nightmares including the pit of despair experiments yes we do have a bad history in the Western world of torturing animals death including monkeys and primates for no outcome that could be justified in this this type of situation so just say this perspective is invaluable it doesn't mean it's not a percent right and it's going to have that bias I mentioned with with feminism as an example if you have a group of feminists feminist activists who are only looking at extreme examples to justify their their perspectives cetera that's problematic in some ways if you have someone working inside the given industry in this case inside the animal experimentation biology research industry what they're familiar with is only is likely to be the opposite maybe personally you're involved with one of those terrible experiments but if not you know you may only know about mediocre you may have a sense of what's average of what's normal in the industry but you may be blinded to the extremes and in legislation we need to be cognizant of both with violence we need legislation that addresses extreme violence you know extreme human behavior of all kinds no matter how improbable and we also need to have social systems that are aware of what's normal what's average what's common and not to treat them all in in the same category um I continue for the time being for many experiments vertebrate or invertebrate animals are all we've got pause so just mentioned in my earlier video I said that in a pithy way where I said look you know it's easy for us as vegans to say people should stop eating meat because they can eat tofu but if you do the research it is not so easy to say we should stop doing original scientific research because we have tofu tofu tofu cannot render these experiments obsolete and this guy this guy is vegan he identifies as vegan obviously he would love to but as as dark and horrifying as torturing a monkey to death is it is not easy to just say well we can substitute tofu and in many of these cases you can't substitute a human being either and so on so again for the time being in 2016 with vegans being a despised minority with no no power with no political ik I'm not looking at eliminating this absolutely because I don't think I can within the next ten years I'm looking at ways to make the process transparent public countable to deepen democracy in reference to vivisection and that will limit it and start a sort of long-term cyclical change that eventually may be able to eliminate vivisection or at least make it very marginal very rare very exceptional eliminate 99.9 percent of it I continue as you point out in your video we can't just snap our fingers and end all animal research neither can we snap our fingers and turn the world vegan as long as most of the world eats meat we have responsibility to look after the millions of animals who live their lives out on farms unfortunately for somewhat obvious reasons infectious disease eg bovine mastitis helminth infections viruses and poultry etc is a huge problem on farms if there's any argument for conducting animal experimentation to benefit human health it is 100 fold greater if we consider the duty we have to reduce suffering amongst the animals who we depend on for food I think in the UK whether they realize it or not most of the public accept that the use of animals and experiments is more valuable than their role in agriculture that's probably why the majority the public here support animal research however there are still large areas of ignorance a recent survey done in England showed that only around half of the 4,000 participants knew that animal testing for cosmetics is illegal here in Britain and the EU and that importing animal tested cosmetics into the UK is against the law clearly testing cosmetics on rabbits is very different from testing vaccines on rodents so there is much work to be done in helping the public make the distinction between animal testing and animal research pause now for practical purposes for this discussion for my viewers for the type of people who are intelligent enough to keep watching this channel and not just get offended and storm out of the room what he just said is not controversial but it's worth pausing to consider that that too many vegans this is controversial the absolutist position the abolitionist position there are many people who would insist on the contrary that no testing a vaccine is identical to testing lipstick to testing cosmetics there are vegans who refuse to make this distinction and in many ways that's just the debate we're all avoiding having but you know if you're immoral is that no research neither cancer nor vaccine or anything else there is no form of research that can justify torturing an animal to death neither a rat Nora monkey that is a position I I respect and I think in a university debating room Nephila in a philosophy department I think that's a debate worth having meanwhile down at Parliament Hill we got to yes we could we have a real life set of murky contradictions and questions of what is the real difference we can make now in the next 10 years we got to roll up our sleeves and cooperate with people like this this guy is incredibly rare this guy is a vegan or a would-be vegan or a semi vegan this guy wants to be vegan who's working in a laboratory currently torturing shellfish to death you know this guy is one in a million right now this is exactly the person you need on your team if you have a vegan charity a vegan organization a vegan lobbying group you know illegally sitting down with a lawyer trying to put together a you know set of proposals for for real reforms this is the kind of perspective you really need to hear even if you disagree with it even if it's wrong even if it's evil okay I've said this too many times lately I don't want to be right I want to win if you are gonna play to win this is the dude you need on your team you told me what just happened with this cameraman screen just turned black all right that's a sign all right sorry about that guys I'm actually filming this in black and white because with so much sunlight coming in my camera has difficulty it doesn't render my image so we'll anyway I'm not gonna read this entire letter you can follow the link below the video if you want to read every single word that he says but to wrap up he says this brings me to another point you made in your video you argue that there should be considerable legislation in place that would make it as difficult as possible to conduct animal research period here I agree with you period so do not under eight that that that is a significance you know concession or point or illustrators perspective I've already said that for me it is not making it as difficult as possible that's the crucial point it's making it as transparent and democratic as possible he continues although we have something like this in the UK I'd be naive to think that it is completely serving its purpose and that there are no loopholes period but what I disagree with you on is that the public should be involved in this decision-making process when it comes to animal research the public plays a vital role in putting pressure on universities and industries to minimize animal experimentation although the general public are not always capable of making their views on vivisection and a carefully considered intellectual weigh the emotional voice is absolutely necessary in this debate using animals and experiments as evil morally wrong and needs to be replaced but should they be involved in regulating animal experiments question mark absolutely not how can you expect the general public to understand the biological arguments for or against using a particular model alright so again you can read his complete letter on my blog but that is the point letter where obviously he does disagree with me which is cool this is a profound problem perhaps especially within Western academia who watches the Watchmen who is the university accountable to I am a sincere voice for democracy I think that my University you know I'm in a department I've had serious problems with I think ultimately the professor's have to be accountable to the students I think the professor's have to be accountable to the public I think the professor's have to be accountable to the government and currently the problems would be see none of those things is true I think anytime you have a self regulating industry you get a disaster even architecture architecture doesn't involve torturing animals to death you can't simply have the architects regulating the field of architecture one of the reasons that apart from corruption apart from bias apart from cronyism you're very powerful things within any any field within any discipline is that you get standards and practices that becomes self-reinforcing over time so you know my sense of what's normal of what standard operating procedure of what my professors told me was okay and now I think is okay over time that becomes self reinforcing and a whole field or discipline can become deeply immoral can accept standards and practices that are not acceptable and that cannot be justified precisely because they do not need to justify it to the public at large now one interesting example is that again involves academia is actually academic research in economics there are really interesting questions where it's like well university professor is supposedly giving his objective opinion about what a company is doing or what a country is doing about a national policy about investing in a country or buying you know investing money in a given country there's a report that looks like an objective report from a university professor from academic expert still with economics but actually it's being paid for well the standards and practices what's been perceived as normal in terms of providing economic consultancy by experts of that time over over time nobody regulates it right there's nobody you know other professors in that field have a feeling of what's normal they play golf together they play golf with the people who pay the money right those reports over time that becomes profoundly corrupting now other people may have other perspectives on this but in terms of this question to whom are the scientists accountable my answer is no it is not to a chorus of their peers it is not within the discipline or to other experts that they will be held accountable and you may call me a naive Democrat but no I really do believe it must be to the public and that you need to have organized constituencies of the public who can deal with those things now again I've mentioned my own experience of City how many times this channel it is bizarre it is very difficult to get a group of concerned citizens to come in and give their opinion on a sewage treatment plant or on a nuclear power plant but it is absolutely crucial that you do just that in Toronto at the time I was involved with City Hall there was one University professor he was an immigrant from Italy who had very different political attitudes in contrast to people born and raised in Canada he really realized the importance of going to City Hall and debating these things and he was point I mean sometimes City Hall would would publish technical documents that were false that contained lies that were factually misleading the public and so it would be this one guy this one university professor it was not being paid for this who's taking it it's time to try to draw the public state look this plan is flawed what have you and then you have a really small group of concerned citizens who would actually show up at City Hall asking tough questions and pointing at look what's going on here is at the very least incompetent as a very interesting example because in that case you know there really was no no single source of corporate corruption it wasn't that there was one company bribing the city to to be inept in its handling of those issues those issues involved sewage treatment ecology in various ways but you had a profoundly inept local government and ultimately you know you needed the public to step up and you know people who get interesting the stuff they will gain the expertise they need it's not that hard you know that one professor was in effect educating a constituency of citizens so they could understand why this chart is flawed why this government report is flawed what the stakes are I mentioned an earlier video just recently you know this issue of just looking at the map and seeing where the sewage is being put into the lake and where there's another pipe that brings in the drinking water you don't need to be an expert to appreciate the gravity of that but working with experts citizens groups being organized lobbying governments so on I many people think I'm an extreme pessimist on this but anyway in in contrast to to this fellow you could say I'm a naive optimist that no I do think it is - it is to the public it is to the public good it is to democracy that scientists and tactical experts and specialists must be accountable how exactly organized that is another question that's gonna be different in England in the United States or elsewhere okay folks um look if you've watched this whole video I don't care if you are in a hospital bed and never go outside you're a vegan activist you know very very few people care enough to even think these things through very few people have that level of passion or commitment to veganism so I want to thank you for watching this video and literally if you have no legs and you're confined to a hospital bed if you've watched this video and you're dealing with these issues I think you're a real vegan activist even if you never leave your hospital bed you never leave your apartment whatever your stuffy is thinking about it and talking about it at this stage in 2016 is a very necessary precursor to real action you know you have to recognize the problem before you can come up with solutions and deploy solutions and meanwhile I got to say just a couple of days ago I was talking to a friend online I looked at somebody else's vegan YouTube channel and they had videos of their grocery shopping and forty thousand people had watched a video probably by now it's more people was a recent video and this this woman filmed like she said things like oh I bought two kilograms of brown rice this is brown rice to kill and like that's it the camera is just filming that oh I bought um I bought tomato sauce these are three jars of tomatoes oh right in my friends thing who could possibly find this interesting unless you've grown up in a place where you don't even know what brown rice looks like or you don't know what tomato sauce looks like if you've grown up in some incredibly exotic distant culture maybe this is fascinating to you but I mean the lifestyle side of veganism and the cuisine stead of veganism I totally appreciate that vastly more people are gonna be interested in watching this stuff no matter how boring it is because in my perspective that stuff stoning ly boring I know what to kilograms of brown rice look like I can't I cannot fathom why this is a popular form of entertainment or educated on on YouTube but it is if you are taking the time out of your day to worry about this to me you're real vegan activist and you give me hope that in the next 10 years we really can make a difference we can do more than just sitting in front of our video cameras and complaining