An Interesting Experience I Had the Other Day...

Because the University of Oxford is currently in the process of building a new biomedical research center that will feature new animal experimentation facilities, Oxford has become a major focus for animal rights protests over the last couple of years. The animal rights organization SPEAK sponsored a large demonstration there on Saturday, January 14, and against my better instincts, and despite Oxford having been transformed into a virtual security state for the day, I decided to go check it out anyway. It was quite an experience, and I wrote about it in the post "Caught in the Line of Fire: Animal Rights Activists Take Over Oxford" on my blog. The post is pretty long, so I didn't put it here, but I'm writing this since my blog is pretty new and I wanted to make sure people had a chance to see it.

Although the demonstration proceeded roughly how I would have expected it to, I learned some interesting and sometimes unexpected things by talking to some of the participants. There seemed to be a disconnect between the leaders of the organizations and the general participants in the protest, with the leadership much more prone to advocate intimidation tactics while most of the participants were very peaceful. However, the participants I talked to were driven by a very fundamental ideology that would not allow them differentiate between different types of animal research or different degrees of humaneness. I also found a widespread belief that the people who engage in animal research do so because they enjoy hurting or killing animals, which I think has important ramifications for how the scientific community should approach animal rights activists, and animal research in general, in the future. It's interesting stuff.