Bad scientific arguments in the service of “animal rights” activism
Keeping in tow with my last post and last week’s ASIC class, Respectful Insolence has a great article on the (un)scientific arguments made by animal rights activists. Here’s an excerpt:
What I am going to discuss is the seemingly scientific arguments that some opponents of animal research and animal rights activists like to invoke, arguments increasingly used in addition to the moral arguments that extremists use to justify their actions. If the arguments of opponents of animal rights research were indeed good science, then their appropriation by extremists would not allow me to do much other than bemoan the misuse of valid science as a justification for extremism. Unfortunately, such is not the case, and the bad scientific arguments used by opponents of animal research are often piled onto the extreme moral arguments that fuel actions such as those last month at UCSC. Consequently, given the events of the last month or so, I thought I would take this opportunity to look at some of the common scientific indictments of animal research by its opponents.
Be sure to weigh in either here or there.
