Customer Reviews

Animal Experimentation: The Moral Issues (Contemporary Issues)

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The essays contained within this book are well chosen, however those supporting the use of animals in research (most of them) simply attack the articles written for the support of animal rights. Whereas the animal rights articles address the issues involved with experimentation. This book is worth reading however should be supplemented with other books to get a good knowledge base about the issues. I would suggest Animal Liberation by Peter Singer as a good start or Diet for a New America by John Robins.

What attracted me to this book was that it had both pro and anti experimentation essays. I guess it wasnt quite what I expected. I was hoping the essayists would back up their positions with lots of examples, statistics, and the like, but actually their arguements are more philosophical. You do get a wide spectrum of all the views from extreme speciest essays (such as the one by Cohen), to more middle ground essays (Hettinger), and even ones calling for direct action (the second essay by Singer). This book is, however, slightly older, and a lot of the arguements made against giving animals rights do not hold... at least for certain animals found to be esp. cognizant (like chimps, gorilla, orangutans, and parrots).

Its important to read about such a controversial issue, but I wish they including more facts (instead of saying 'there are many unnecessary experiments' explain which ones exist or instead of simply stating 'we cured polio because of animals' explain how...). This may not be the best book exploring both sides of the issue, but there are few unbiased books like this one.