Abstract
Animal rights and experimentation have become the focus of a major controversy in the United States, with acute implications for animal-related research in the laboratories and veterinary schools of many American universities. To date, efforts to reduce fundamental disagreements between animal researchers and animal welfare groups or to redefine their differences in ways that satisfy all concerned have by and large not been successful. In such situations where it is not possible to identify a middle ground between conflicting positions, the best a policy analyst may be able to do is to accentuate the issue's manifest topsy-turviness and uncertainties. No one can afford or risk having an issue of such high uncertainty, inconsistency, and stakes defined in terms so stark that they feel compelled to choose between those who say they know that the future shall hold us accountable for our wholesale slaughter of animals and those who would blame us for the human deaths they say will surely follow when we do not allow that slaughter.
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Emery Roe is a senior administrative analyst in the University of California's Office of Research and Public Policy and has a postdoctoral fellowship in resource economics at the University's Berkeley campus. He has published widely on agricultural, livestock, and environmental issues in the U.S. and Africa.
The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and not of the University of California or any of its units.
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Roe, E.M. Nonsense, fate, and policy analysis: The case of animal rights and experimentation. Agric Hum Values 6, 21–29 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02217810
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02217810