When scientists recently discovered the virus that causes sudden acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), most of the world cheered. But not everyone. Why? Finding the cause of SARS required animal research. But animal rights/liberation activist believe that we should not be allowed to use animals in medical research.

Animal rights activists claim that they are compassionate. But banning the use of animals in medical research would cause great human harm. How can a political movement be called compassionate when its goals, if achieved, would cause tremendous human suffering?

This is the truth that the animal rights movement refuses to accept. Sometimes scientists require living, breathing research subjects to obtain valuable medical knowledge. That means using animals when the experiment may harm the research subjects or cause their deaths.

This truth was vividly demonstrated when SARS began to quickly spread around the world. Not only were thousands of people infected and hundreds of people die, but the economies of several nations were terribly damaged as people stopped traveling to locales where the disease had broken out.

To stem the spread of the SARS and prevent further panic, researchers began a frantic search for its cause. They thought they had isolated a new virus in some human victims that could be the cause, but they had to be sure. This required intentionally infecting research subjects with the suspect virus, studying the effects of the disease, and allowing the subjects to die to determine whether the tissue damage caused by the induced illness matched that seen in human SARS victims.

If animals—in this case monkeys—had not been used in the SARS investigation, the investigation could not have proceeded. After all, the experiments were not intended to benefit the research subjects but, indeed, to make them sick and cause their deaths from disease.

For that reason, using animals was the only moral choice. At least that is true if one believes that human lives matter more than animal lives.

Thanks to the now-certain identification of the SARS pathogen, scientists can move to the next stages of combating the disease. Researchers will attempt to develop a reliable diagnostic test. They will also try different treatment protocols. And, they will work overtime to develop a vaccine.

Of necessity, all of these endeavors will require further research upon animals, some of which will be intentionally infected, some of which will suffer, some of which will die. But it is either sacrifice these animals or hinder the battle against SARS, leading to much unalleviated human misery and many deaths.

Despite the obvious need to use animals, as typified by the SARS experiments, animal rights/liberationists will continue to oppose their use. Worse, the more extreme among them will continue to invade laboratories and steal the research animals and otherwise harass scientists who use animals in their compassionate work of alleviating human suffering.

So, the next time you are tempted to smile at the loony antics of animal rights/liberationists, remember that there is a terrible dark side to their movement. As their opposition to the use of animals in medical research demonstrates, stripped of its pretensions and emotionalism, animal rights/liberation isn’t just pro-animal: It is also anti-human.

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