Sacrifice or Salvation: How can Animal Lives be Spared and Human Health Improved by Toxics Reform?

This dissertation investigates the complexities of the entwined relations between animal cognition, the use of animals in toxicity testing, and the proliferation and impacts of harmful chemicals in our society. It asks how, in light of the most current research on animal sentience and the ethics of responsibility, a reorientation of chemical testing at a theoretical, ethical and practical level could spare animal suffering and improve human health outcomes. Its starting point is the unfolding scientific research on animal cognition, and the consequent implications for reconsidering the ethical relationships, historically established and currently assumed, between human and non-human animals. The central issue, which infuses this dissertation, is whether humans are obliged by this knowledge to expand our moral arena to encompass animals, to acknowledge their entitlement not to be used for toxicity experimentation, and the implications of such an entitlement for the future use of animals in toxicity testing.
The work is based on a social constructivist process centred on the multiple facets of toxicity testing – the philosophical viewpoints of those who have expressed concern for the well-being of animals, governments’ animal protection laws that fail to spare animals from painful experimentation, toxics laws that promote the use of animals in toxicity tests, the pain and suffering of the tests themselves, the championing of the mouse as the favoured animal for experimentation, and the limitations and failure of toxicity testing itself to safeguard public health and the environment from widespread contamination. In addition, this examination of toxicity testing looks at the potential differences between advocates of expanded testing of toxic chemicals and animal advocates concerned about the implications of expanded testing for the increased use of animals. Finally, building on qualitative methods for assessing the current state of knowledge regarding the use of animals in toxicity testing, this dissertation evaluates how this system could be redrawn to both spare animals and better gauge the toxicity of chemicals.