Vivisection, an insider's perspective [Shorter, edited version]

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 kicked it open I mean other vegans just do not tackle this or do not deal with the necessary way that admits of the complex gray areas and overlapping kind of moral jurisdictions this 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 these experiments absolutely I've honest yen just you know create a fairly popular vegan youtube channel and then sit back and wait for someone awesome to contact to you it's pretty as the ballast CL recommended in one of his billions of I bus yen i would post it here but i won't know which one too many 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 their the crucial partners you've got to have on board if you're going to 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 hello izel he writes I've thought about mailing you for a while and never got around to it put your recent video vivisection 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 I went on a four day training program on murine / 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 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 and experience just such as this one I was already thinking about that stuff when I was a high school student 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 Oh though he had not trained formally as a biologist ie 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 presentation 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 I think in the UK whether they realize it or not most of the public except 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 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 your moral position 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 nor monkey that is a position I I respect and I think in a university debating room I've been a fill-in a philosophy department I think that's a debate worth having meanwhile down at Parliament Hill we got a deal this week 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 well you know illegally sitting down with a lawyer trying to put together a you know set of proposals 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 to many times lately I don't want to be right I want to win if you are going to play to win this is the dude you need on your team there are vegans who be offended that I'm not just taking the simplistic abolitionist position of saying what 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 your minority is is correct having a truly democratic public accountability accountable process pertaining to animal exploitation 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 legitimate heirs that's one thing but you would immediately see the disappearance of torturing an animal a monkey to death just for psychological research which we have had a lot of in the Western world again I mentioned that 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 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 almost like Lee 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 expert 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 for the time being for many experiments vertebrate or invertebrate animals are all we've got pause so just mention in my early video I said that in a pity 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 so again for the time being in 2016 with vegans being a despised minority with no no power with no pull if public I'm not looking at eliminating this absolutely because I don't think I can in the next 10 years I'm looking at ways to make the process transparent public countable to deepen democracy in reference to vivisection and hope 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 ninety-nine point nine percent of it if you are taking the time out of your day to worry about this to me your 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