blog.andrewsteele.co.uk

Oxford has today played host to a media circus, a flood of Police, a raft of protesters and all manner of other metaphors as the inaugural demonstration of Pro-Test, Oxford’s new-founded pro-animal-testing lobby, marched.

The day was chosen to coincide with SPEAK’s monthly demo, a combination which proved disappointingly confrontation-retardant for anyone of either disposition looking for a fight.

Pro-Test mustered a slightly disappointing 800 or so followers, but made up some way for it with a set of sometimes-entertaining speakers and a wide repertoire of chants.

SPEAK could only manage perhaps 100 activists, and had a significantly less diverse array of slogans: “Stop the Oxford animal lab!” was very occasionally augmented by swapping “animal” for “torture” - I’m not sure if this counts as a different slogan, or simply a remix.

The Police put on an excellent show, with a full complement of horses, Police vans, Police motorbikes, bobbies on foot, cops on pedal-bikes and CCTV vans. Their selection of slogans and chants was disappointing, however.

The factions are campaigning because Oxford University is continuing the construction of an animal housing facility which will be used to improve facilities for medical testing on animals; SPEAK and their ilk want the building to stop, Pro-Test, a huge majority of the student body and others want the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a semi-terrorist anti-vivisection organisation, to stop threatening students and staff, burning down boathouses and so on, and other protesters to stop shouting their irritating slogans at all hours of the day and night around the town.

Whilst it’s almost a truism to say that I object to the extremist actions of the ALF (especially as technically I count as a target), I think the debate over animal testing is a thorny one. Any attempt to ethically determine its rightness runs into problems immediately: are animals even conscious and thus is it worth considering? If so, can we use utilitarian arguments to justify the small number of animal deaths with the vast number of human (and animal) lives saved by the treatments we develop? They’d eat us in the wild, and we’re at the top of the food chain, so do we just have the right? Or have we transcended evolution, and should we therefore, with our moral minds, be setting an example even though a ravening lion will never follow it?

The answer probably lies somewhere near the average Oxford student’s apathetic pragmatism; the UK has some of the best animal rights legislation in the World, with incomparably strict regulations governing research. If this lab doesn’t get built, the research will be sent to the States and the continent where researchers aren’t under the scrutiny they receive here. And, importantly, we still haven’t come up with a convincing alternative; whatever few examples animal rights protesters may cite as failures of animal testing in the past, our only chance for improvement is to keep trying, and one day ditch it when we have something more reliable.

A good protest is actually quite a laugh; I’m not sure it would’ve been as much fun had I been a protester rather than running around trying to get photos for Cherwell, dodging in between the professional media with cameras twice the size of mine, but there was a certain air of importance and excitement with all the Sky News vans and important people buzzing around. I even got a photo of Nick Higham (BBC journalist) doing a piece to camera!

I shall finish this fragmented summary with a quick note to anyone thinking of speaking at any kind of rally: make sure every third sentence you offer the crowd something to shout “Yeah!” in response to. One chap tried getting the crowd to shout “No!” and they proved unresponsive and slightly confused. Rhetorical questions requiring more complicated answers are right out.

Saturday, February 25th, 2006 16:28 | permalink | trackback