8.5 Animal Rights and the Implications for Business

A Brief History of the Animal Rights Movement

Rhode Island, along with Boulder, Colorado, and Berkeley, California, led the way in enacting legislation recognizing individuals as guardians, not owners, of their animals, thus giving animals legal status beyond being just items of property. Many U.S. colleges now teach courses on animal rights law, there is strong support for granting fundamental legal rights to animals, and some attorneys, scientists, and ethicists dedicate their careers to animal rights.

The animal movement started in the late nineteenth century when the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) was formed, along with the American Humane Association. The American Welfare Institute and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) were established in the 1950s. The first federal animal protection law, the Humane Slaughter Act, was passed in the 1950s to avoid unnecessary suffering to farm animals (ten billion of which are killed every year). The most important U.S. law forbidding cruelty to animals in laboratory settings was enacted in 1966; the Animal Welfare Act requires basic humane conditions to be maintained for animals in testing facilities. Finally, in the 1970s and 1980s, the modern animal rights social movement emerged. It has led to an increased awareness of animal ethics by consumers and businesses.

However, despite significant progress, research using animals for product testing continues to be controversial in the United States, particularly because improved technology has offered humane and effective alternatives. The use of animals in biomedical research has drawn slightly less negative reaction than in consumer product testing, because of the more critical nature of the research. Though animal welfare laws have ameliorated some of the pain of animals used in biomedical research, ethical concerns remain, and veterinarians and physicians are demanding change, as are animal rights groups and policy and ethics experts. Increased integration of ethics in business conduct is operating alongside the desire to recognize animal rights, the entitlement of nonhuman animals to ethical treatment.

The Ethics of What We Eat

Concern for the welfare of animals beyond pets brings us to the agribusiness industry. This is where groups such as the ASPCA and HSUS have been particularly active. Agribusiness is a huge industry that provides us with the food we eat, including plant-based and animal-based foodstuffs. The industry has changed significantly over the past century, evolving from one consisting primarily of family and/or small businesses to a much larger one dominated mostly by large corporations. Aspects of this business with relevant and interrelated ethical questions range from ecology, animal rights, and economics to food safety and long-term sustainability (Figure 8.11). To achieve a high level of sustainability in the world’s food supply chain, all stakeholders—the political sector, the business sector, the finance sector, the academic sector, and the consumer—must work in concert to achieve an optimal result, and a cost-benefit analysis of ethics in the food industry should include a recognition of all their concerns.

The Use of Animals in Medical and Cosmetic Research

Viewpoints about animals used in medical research are changing in very significant ways and have resulted in a variety of initiatives seeking alternatives to animal testing. As an example, in conjunction with professionals from human and veterinary medicine and the law, the Yale University Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy, a bioethics research institute, is seeking alternatives to animal testing that focus on animal welfare.

Animals such as monkeys and dogs are used in medical research ranging from the study of Parkinson disease to toxicity testing and studies of drug interactions and allergies. There is no question that medical research is a valuable and important practice. The question is whether the use of animals is a necessary or even best practice for producing the most reliable results. Alternatives include the use of patient-drug databases, virtual drug trials, computer models and simulations, and noninvasive imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography scans.⁴³ Other techniques, such as microdosing, use humans not as test animals but as a means to improve the accuracy and reliability of test results. In vitro methods based on human cell and tissue cultures, stem cells, and genetic testing methods are also increasingly available.

As for consumer product testing, which produces the loudest outcry, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act does not require that animal tests be conducted to demonstrate the safety of cosmetics. Rather, companies test formulations on animals in an attempt to protect themselves from liability if a consumer is harmed by a product. However, a significant amount of new research shows that consumer products such as cosmetics can be accurately tested for safety without the abuse of animals. Some companies may resist altering their methods of conducting research, but a growing number are now realizing that their customers are demanding a change.

Regulating the Use of Animals in Research and Testing

Like virtually every other industrialized nation, the United States permits medical experimentation on animals, with few limitations (assuming sufficient scientific justification). The goal of any laws that exist is not to ban such tests but rather to limit unnecessary animal suffering by establishing standards for the humane treatment and housing of animals in laboratories.

As explained by Stephen Latham, the director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale,⁴⁴ possible legal and regulatory approaches to animal testing vary on a continuum from strong government regulation and monitoring of all experimentation at one end, to a self-regulated approach that depends on the ethics of the researchers at the other end. The United Kingdom has the most significant regulatory scheme, whereas Japan uses the self-regulation approach. The U.S. approach is somewhere in the middle, the result of a gradual blending of the two approaches.

A movement has begun to win legal recognition of chimpanzees as the near-equivalent of humans, therefore, as “persons” with legal rights. This is analogous to the effort called environmental justice, an attempt to do the same for the environment (discussed in the section on Environmental Justice in Three Special Stakeholders: Society, the Environment, and Government). A nonprofit organization in Florida, the Nonhuman Rights Project, is an animal advocacy group that has hired attorneys to present a theory in court that two chimpanzees (Tommy and Kiko) have the legal standing and right to be freed from cages to live in an outdoor sanctuary (Figure 8.12). In this case, the attorneys have been trying for years to get courts to grant the chimps habeas corpus (Latin for “you shall have the body”), a right people have under the U.S. Constitution when held against their will. To date, this effort has been unsuccessful.⁴⁵ The courts have extended certain constitutional rights to corporations, such as the First Amendment right to free speech (in the 2010 Citizens United case). Therefore, some reason, a logical extension of that concept would hold that animals and the environment have rights as well.

In cosmetic testing, the United States has relatively few laws protecting animals, whereas about forty other nations have taken more direct action. In 2013, the European Union banned animal testing for cosmetics and the marketing and sale of cosmetics tested on animals. Norway and Switzerland passed similar laws. Outside Europe, a variety of other nations, including Guatemala, India, Israel, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, and Turkey, have also passed laws to ban or limit cosmetic animal testing. U.S. cosmetic companies will not be able to sell their products in any of these countries unless they change their practices. The Humane Cosmetics Act has been introduced but not yet passed by Congress. If enacted, it would end cosmetics testing on animals in the United States and ban the import of animal-tested cosmetics.⁴⁶ However, in the current antiregulatory environment, passage seems unlikely.