Animal welfare | Workers' Liberty

Health-anuary

06 Feb 2019 |

Martin Thomas

For January 2019, 4.2 million people said they would join “Dry January”, a pledge to drop alcohol for the month. The Alcohol Change UK group, which organised “Dry January”, says that (even if some of those 4.2 million had lapses) this year’s response was the biggest ever, and hugely up on January 2013, when the project started with just 4,000 signing up. “Veganuary” had 250,000 people adopting a vegan diet for the month, more than its total for all its previous Januarys combined, 2014 to 2018. 84% of January-vegans and maybe 70% of all vegans are female (2018 stats), although vegetarians are...

Tough On Kids, Tough On the Causes of Kids! (1997)

21 Jun 2014

Labour's Shadow Home Secretary, Jack Straw, recently proposed a curfew on children. He opened his heart and mind to Workers Liberty reporter Patrick Avakuum. --- AS Tony Blair's team waits impatiently to cross the floor of the House of Commons and show that they can outdo the Tories, Jack Straw, Labour's Shadow Home Secretary has emerged as an unexpected Front Bench star in this brilliant company. For a long time Straw — "straw in his name, straw in his mouth, straw between his ears" as someone once unkindly said —was regarded as the village idiot of the Front Bench. Not any more. Straw has...

Televote TV Goes Wild

08 Dec 2006 | Blog post

Now this is getting ridiculous. Tomorrow night sees the start of a new TV show where celebrities hang out with endangered species. Then you the viewer get to vote for which animals should get help to survive.

Yes, really. Don't vote and the furry fellas die out. You choose. Will it be the Polar...

Rights for Great Apes?

29 May 2006 | Blog post

I recommend this excellent, thought-provoking article by Princeton University bioethics professor Peter Singer in Saturday's Guardian. His argument is that great apes are so close to humans in evolution, and share so many of our traits - long-term relationships, self-awareness, bereavement...

Dehumanising?

27 Apr 2006

In Solidarity 3/89 David Broder started a discussion on animal testing and the broader issue of “animal rights”. Here Clive Bradley and Janine Booth take issue with David. His reply and other debate can be found at: www.workersliberty.org/node/5802 I am not going to argue that medical testing on animals should be halted. I am an insulin-dependent diabetic, and — actually I’m hazy on the precise history of what's called “human insulin”, but it's likely it involved animal testing, without which I would be dead. But there are aspects to the argument David puts — which is pretty typical of a...

The case for testing on animals

11 Mar 2006

David Broder, a former animal rights activist, assesses the the issues behind scientific (and not so scientific) tests on animals It’s no surprise that there are plenty of people who oppose Oxford University building animal testing labs. At a February 2005 High Court hearing, British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection activists claimed that at Cambridge, healthy and intelligent monkeys had the tops of their heads sawn off in order to induce strokes. After this ordeal, the monkeys were left without veterinary care for 15 hours, their brains exposed. Harrowing stuff. But the Research Defence...

The left should back science!

11 Mar 2006

Sacha Ismail spoke to Tom Ogg, an Oxford University student involved in Pro-Test, which campaigns in favour of animal testing for research and medical purposes. What is Pro-Test? The campaign was started by Laurie Pycroft, who’s a school student taking a year off from his A-Levels due to illness. Laurie set up a website, through which a number of university students got in touch with him; word got round on message boards, email lists and so on, and it went from there. That was when I got involved. Our main campaign is in support of a new biomedical research lab being built on South Parks Road...

Should scientists be allowed to experiment on animals?

02 Mar 2006

Should we support the right for scientists to do experiments on animals? The socialist scientist Steven Rose, who experiments on chicks in basic research into human brain function and memory, writes about this in his book The Making of Memory... For anyone who holds an absolutist animal-rights position there can be no doubt that in killing the chicks I have done evil; demonstrated a hegemonic concern to dominate nature; caused pain; behaved, unequivocally, as a speciesist. Sure, everything I have done has been under authorization by quite stringent British Home Office laws, which regulate the...