The expansion of rights from humans to animals

The European Parliament has recently revised rules for the European Union on the use and treatment of laboratory animals in research. I understand it has earlier been working on the treatment of livestock.

There is increasing concern for the humane treatment of pet animals. Some years ago I read about the use of "cat units" in pharmacy. A century ago there were a lot of plant products used rather than manufactured pharmaceuticals. Digitalis was one such product, extracted from foxglove by the local pharmacist. Of course too much digitalis or too little is dangerous, and the level of the chemical in plants depended on soils, exposure to sunlight, weather and other variables. So there was a standard for concentration, based on how much was needed to kill a cat. Pharmacies collected stray (and sometimes not so stray) cats and kept them caged in the back room to have a ready supply on which to test their digitalis. Indeed there was an extensive literarure on cat units. (They did not use dog units because neighbors got too upset when the dogs started to disappear!) This approach now seems completely immoral, although millions of dogs and cats are still destroyed each year when they can not find humans willing to take responsibility for them.

When I was running a research program for USAID I was concerned about rules for the treatment of non-human primates, different rules for the treatment of other laboratory animals, still more rules for the treatment of livestock involved in research, and still further rules for the treatment of wild animals affected by research.

Generally there is increasing concern that animals not suffer unnecessarily, and considerable debate over when purposes can be considered sufficiently important to justify "necessary" suffering.

I have been posting for some time on human rights (click on the tag below). The concern for human rights has evolved over time. A couple of hundred years ago slavery was still legal in many countries. Human rights have been incorporated in more and more national constitutions and legal systems. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights six decades ago began the construction of an international system to protect human rights.

I suspect that the trend towards more respect for human rights and more respect towards animal rights are related, and part of "modernization". Perhaps in part because more people have the resources to indulge in such nicities, perhaps in part because our urban society results in few of us having to personally use violence against people or animals, perhaps in part because modern science is showing how similar all people are to each other, and how much we have in common with animals.

All in all, the trend towards more respect for human and animal rights seems one of the most encouraging of historical developments, helping me to believe we really are making progress through civilization.