Universal wolf, universal prey

Animal testing is an issue in the UK. Most of the New Labour apparatus is clear that the medical benefits to man trump the emotionalism of the anti-vivisectionists and that the illegal, sometimes terroristic attacks on scientists must be beaten. When I've seen the issue raised on conservative sites (diabolical britspeak profanity warning), the likes of PETA are scorned to the hilt...tree-hugging liberals....skinny twerps. The BBC just staged a debate. The protestors were inarticulate dolts. The scientists were cool and logical within their definitions.
But still it stinks. To refute a common debating point: would I accept animal testing to save myself? Yes. So I'm a hypocrite and the anti-vivisection argument fails? Yes, I'm a hypocrite, no the argument doesn't fail. I would accept testing on any animal, but especially on the human animal, to save myself. That makes me selfish (and sane), but the anti-vivisection argument stands since Law should protect the rest of you against me as I wish Law to protect other animals against us.

The fallacy in all this is the ego-syntonic superstition that human animals are more important than other animals. Maybe, maybe not, but a scientist should be sceptical of human criteria to decide the question. Mankind vivisects because it can and because it can sanitise the the disgusting, cowardly deed by keeping it out of sight. I don't know about animal rights, but I do sense the virtue in human duties, one of which is the duty to abstain from tormenting other animals. If the cost of that is worse medicine (though I doubt it), then so be it for the sake of decency.

Things change. Orthodoxies change. This perversion of science, which includes abortion and vivisection, is not science, but a guilty use of power..

"Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite (an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power)
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last, eat up himself."

Embryonic stem cell research is nicely pinned by "and last, eat up himself."