Emor
Leviticus 21:1-24:34
Ezekiel 44:15-31
From his precarious position on the Campanile high above the U.C. Berkeley campus, the young man unfurled signs denouncing scientific experimentation on animals. Thousands of animals live and die in the university laboratories. If he could convince the academic leaders to oppose the practice, they could restrict or ban animal experiments.
On the other hand, we would pay a price for banning all animal experimentation. Medical researchers use animals to advance human health, and most people welcome practical advances in medicine achieved at the expense of laboratory animals. We also have a stake in pure research, perhaps not as vital, but still significant, and in testing the safety of commercial products.
Faced with ethical dilemmas, particularly when the anticipated gain in knowledge seems too trivial and the treatment of the animal too cruel, most of us would like someone — an animal subjects committee perhaps — to forbid proposed experiments.
That committee might demand higher standards for experiments on monkeys than for those on mice and frogs; it might relax the standards for experiments on planaria and fruit flies; and even the young man on the Campanile might allow experiments on plants, bacteria and yeasts.
Why? Do we respect the rights of some animals because they appear sentient and so deserve protection, or because these animals resemble humans, and therefore arouse our protective emotions? Do we want to prohibit some experiments because we care about the animal subjects, or the human experimenters?
The modern debate about animal experimentation hinges on competing theories of our obligations to animals. Jewish scholars debated similar theories in an old argument about the commandment: “And an ox or a lamb, you shall not slaughter it and its child on the same day” (Leviticus 22:28).
Maimonides (1135-1204) explains this commandment in terms of the feelings of the animal. Following this prohibition would discourage people from killing the young “in the sight of its mother; for the distress of the animals under such circumstances is very great. There is no difference in this case between the distress of humans and the distress of other living beings, since the love and tenderness of the mother for her young is produced not by reasoning, but by imagination, and this faculty exists not only in humans but in most living beings” (Guide of the Perplexed 3:38).
Nachmanides (1195-1270) forcefully rejects the idea that the Torah has concern for the animals themselves. If it had, the Torah would certainly have prohibited any slaughter for food. The reason for forbidding slaughter of the parent and offspring on the same day “is to teach us the trait of compassion and that we should not be cruel, for cruelty proliferates in a person’s soul” (Commentary on Deuteronomy 22:6). Elsewhere in the same note, Nachmanides writes: “Surely you must say that the commandments have been given only in order to refine the human.”
A few years later, in a note on a different topic entirely, the anonymous author of the Book of Education observes that “the Eternal Lord permitted the flesh of living creatures to people for no other purpose than atonement or human needs, such as food or medicine, or any thing of which human beings have need. But to kill them without any useful purpose at all — there is destruction in this, and it is called spilling blood. Even though it is not like spilling human blood, in view of human superiority and the inferiority of cattle, this is still called spilling blood, for the biblical verse has not permitted the spilling without any useful purpose” (Sefer HaHinnukh 186).
Thus, Nachmanides locates the moral significance of animals in our emotions: If we mistreat animals, we develop cruel personalities. Maimonides locates the moral significance of animals in their emotions: If we mistreat animals, they feel as distressed as we would. And the author of the Book of Education locates the moral significance of animals in their intrinsic value before God.
So where does this leave us? As usual when we study difficult questions, still perplexed, but with a wider understanding.