You're in a cage. This cage is scarcely larger than your body and you find yourself immobilized within. You can't turn your head because it too is secured in place and so you wait...nervously, anxiously, all the while in a borderline state of panic. You hardly notice that the greater part of your head is positioned outside of the cage, but all too soon it makes sense. A person is approaching, they seem to be carrying a variety of medical-use items, and before you can reduce the complexities of the situation unfolding, a pair of forceps have forced one of your eyes wide open. The pain is aggressively terrible and you are terrified, "why," after all, "would I ever be in this position?," you ask. No more quickly than rendering yourself helplessly impotent, a syringe filled with some future cosmetic or toiletry chemical is deposited on your eye, the forceps are removed, and your eye is cinched shut with a clamp-like bandage, leaving as much of the chemical as fitfully possible. The pain is nothing like you've ever felt, nor have ever cared to imagine. In a cruel mix of fate the chemical not only dissolves your eye, rendering you blind, but sears the flesh off your face from the upper cheek to the brow ridge. In an exponentiation of terror and fear, the excruciating pain from the blistering chemical reaction combined with the total immobility of your head and body leave you in a psychological grab-bag of grief, misery, and suffering (little do you know that you may be in this position for the next ten days). Unable to move, urinating and excreting waste on yourself, contemplating the utter agony which you now find yourself in, welcome to the life of a rabbit who, ripped from her life of enjoyment of foraging and playing with other rabbits, is now having chemicals tested on her eye so that you, great consumers, may have your Revlon makeup, Chanel perfume, and Crest mouthwash without any worries.
I guess, and what I will argue at much greater length in another post, is that if the justification for (non-human) animal experimentation is premised on the idea that (non-human) animals are somehow different from human animals, then why do we continue to test a variety of chemicals on disparate members of the animal kingdom? For if the differences are as great as professed, then how could we possibly infer anything from these experimentations? In addition, the differences must be so great as to render the moral objections to such a practice moot, the fact that they do not should itself raise serious doubts as to the legitimacy of these claims. Subsequently, it is without doubt that the similarities between species must be so strikingly similar that we necessarily infer such claimed properties from these tests, such as how a splash of nail-polish remover in one's eye will not lead to blindness (which we know from testing absurd concentrations of it on different animals' eyes), for if we could not infer such properties what, outside the practice of sadistic cruelty, would be the purpose of performing such barbaric acts?
The purpose of this brief introduction to non-human animal rights argumentation was to present one of the unjustified, savage acts of cruelty that is perpetrated against are animal neighbors each day. The ignorance and indifference with which normal people view this is either an intellectual emergency or a moral atrocity, probably both. While "good" people are saving the world from African poverty or reminiscing over the lives lost in Iraq, there occurs a slaughter of Holocaust proportions each day. To somehow shed tears for the death of 3 thousand people in collapsed buildings, who arguably acted to perpetuate their own demise, and not blink an eye at the extinction of 10 billion sentient beings per year seems to me to be a moral outrage of epic proportions, though wholly unsurprising given the level of stupefying ignorance held by this country's members. -Michael Griffin
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4 comments:
WOW! So brutal and graphic, talk about a call to action!! Bravo!
beautiful michael.
i'm so glad you've found a use in rhetoric - a way to use rhetorical strategies for something you believe in ethically. nicely done.
ps. let's talk midterm action!
When Reese Witherspoon’s character in Legally Blonde 2 takes on the cosmetics-testing industry, everyone in the audience roots for her success against the cruel animal experimenters. In real life, too, most people agree that smearing hair color into a rabbit’s eye and pumping shampoo into a guinea pig’s stomach is idiotic. The European Union recently made its distaste for the practice public policy by voting to phase out all consumer product testing on animals.
In the U.S., most people believe that this is a battle we won years ago. They are wrong, and their mistaken belief that no one kills animals in order to produce a new cosmetic or toiletry item means that they have stopped using their consumer dollars to protest this most despicable animal abuse. If we are to achieve the goal of the EU (and Witherspoon’s character)—an end to the use of animals in product testing—this must change.
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