The New York Review of Books

The following statement concerning Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation (New York Review/Random House, second edition, 1990), was sent to The New York Review following a review by Mr. Singer of several books on the treatment of animals in the April 9 issue.

To the Editors:

The objectives of both editions of Singer’s book are clearly stated in the preface of the 1975 edition, which is reprinted in the 1990 version. He wishes to convince us that “animals suffer from the tyranny of human beings” (p. iii) and to persuade us to end this “oppression and exploitation” of animals by extending to them “the basic moral principle of equal consideration of interests” (p. ii). To achieve these goals, he uses the techniques of propagandists, but he masquerades them in the guise of responsible scholarship. His methods include quoting authorities out of context, misquoting them, and quoting from obscure sources that are at best difficult to find and frequently impossible to check. Because of space limitations, we shall restrict our comments to his chapter on the use of animals in biomedical research, and present only three examples of the misrepresentations that it contains.

Singer selects research projects that can be exploited for maximal emotional impact and portrays them as the norm. About 25 percent of the pages in this chapter are devoted to criticizing studies on animal behavior and drug addiction—yet such research constitutes a very small fraction of the total use of animals in research and testing. He is particularly critical of the work of Harry Harlow and others who studied the effects of rearing infant monkeys in isolation. In attempting to discredit the value of and need for such studies, Singer quotes (p. 32) a British psychiatrist, John Bowlby,¹ who wrote:

The evidence has been reviewed at some length because much of it is still little known and the issue of whether deprivation causes psychiatric disturbance is still discussed as though it were an open question. It is submitted that the evidence is now such that it leaves no room for doubt regarding the general proposition—that the prolonged deprivation of the young child of maternal care may have grave and far-reaching effects on his character and so on the whole of his future life. Although it is a proposition exactly similar in form to those regarding the evil after-effects of rubella in foetal life or deprivation of vitamin D in infancy, there is a curious resistance to accepting it.

Singer’s quote deleted the important qualifier in the first sentence (underlined) without using ellipsis dots to indicate the deletion, and he neglected to include the last sentence (also underlined). He states that even though Bowlby’s conclusions were made in 1951, before Harlow began his research, “This did not deter Harlow and his colleagues from devising and carrying out their monkey experiments” (p. 32). However, when stated correctly (i.e. as he wrote them), Bowlby’s conclusions support doing the kind of studies that Harlow and others conducted in order to test the validity of the clinical evidence in an animal model. Such tests would (and did) convince skeptical physicians of the dire consequences of inadequate maternal attention.

It is significant, but not surprising, that Singer neglects to mention any of the benefits that have derived from the studies of Harlow and his associates. These benefits include improved methods of care for premature infants so that they thrive and thus can be removed from incubators earlier, and the acquisition of important insights into helping children who have problems socializing with their peers.²

In another attempt to discredit animal psychology research, Singer selectively quotes (p. 47) from an article by Steven Maier,³ which examines the usefulness of learned helplessness in animals as a model of depression in humans. The complete statement of Maier (beginning in the middle of a paragraph, where Singer’s quote begins) follows, and the sections that Singer deleted are underlined:

It can be argued that there is not enough agreement about the characteristics, neurobiology, induction, and prevention/cure of depression to make such comparison meaningful. Indeed, it has been argued that depression itself would not meet a rigorous application of the above criteria (McKinney, 1974). That is, depression might be sufficiently heterogenous in behavioral characteristics, neurobiology, causation, and prevention, that a given collection of depressed individuals might not closely match another. It might seem that a consideration of subtypes would resolve the issue, but even subtypes are probably not unitary in nature. Even a subtype of depression is a clinically defined syndrome or collection of events, and there is no strong reason to believe that such a collection will have a single cause. There may be many “routes” to what is labelled as depression, and they may not reduce to a single type even on a conceptual level. It would thus appear unlikely that learned helplessness is a model of depression in any general sense. However, animal “models” seem useful precisely because they do not duplicate the full clinical phenomenon but can allow the study of a single “route” in isolation [emphasis added].

Singer then states (p. 47), “Although Maier tries to salvage something from this dismaying conclusion by saying that learned helplessness may constitute a model not of depression but of ‘stress and coping,’ he has effectively admitted that more than thirty years of animal experimentation have been a waste of time and of substantial amounts of taxpayers’ money, quite apart from the immense amount of acute physical pain that they have caused.”

Thus, Singer completely misrepresents the sense of the statement from which he selectively quoted. Maier was in fact saying that although none of the available models of learned helplessness in animals duplicates exactly the condition(s) of depression in humans, the models are nevertheless useful for studying components of depression and how the condition(s) may develop.

One final example will further serve to illustrate Singer’s modus operandi. In a section on drug testing, Singer states (p. 53): “In fact, even when the test [in animals] is carried out on a medical product, it is most probably not going to do anything to improve our health. Scientists working for the British Department of Health and Social Security examined drugs marketed in Britain between 1971 and 1981. New drugs, they found,

have largely been introduced into therapeutic areas already heavily oversubscribed …for conditions which are common, largely chronic and occur principally in the affluent Western Society. Innovation is therefore largely directed towards commercial returns rather than therapeutic need.⁴

The first and second parts of this seemingly condemnatory quote are separated by more than six pages of text in the article cited. The section after the ellipsis is taken from the Discussion and Conclusions, in which the bulk of the text is summarized. By juxtaposing the two disparate statements as if they came from a single sentence, Singer makes the report seem to be much more critical of drug marketing than the authors intended (as is readily discernable by anyone reading the entire report. This sort of “scholarship” illustrates why writers are taught to be very careful in the use of ellipsis in direct quotes). It is significant that Singer omitted the sentence following the second part of his quote, vis., “The pharmaceutical industry like any other major industry is of necessity motivated by the need to be profitable.”⁵ Singer again twists the words of others to make them fit his version of the truth. Although most new drugs may be directed at alleviating the more common ailments of Western society, the process ensures that better pharmaceuticals are continually made available.

These are but three examples of many that we could cite to show how Singer misrepresents the truth about biomedical research and drug and product-safety testing. In addition, many of the sources that he cites could not be found (e.g., his ref. 62 and the first part of 87) or verified (e.g., 63, 105, 109). The number of errors in his citations (e.g., incorrect volume numbers, dates, journal titles) are also remarkable for a “scholar’s” work.

In the preface to the second edition of his book, Singer comments that the first edition is often referred to as the “bible” of the animal liberation movement. He states: “I don’t believe in bibles; no book has a monopoly on truth” (p. viii). This statement is most appropriate for both editions of Animal Liberation. Singer also proclaims: “The strength of the case for Animal Liberation is its ethical commitment; we occupy the high moral ground and to abandon it is to play into the hands of those who oppose us” (p. xiii). Singer’s ideas about what constitutes “the high moral ground” are evidently quite different from those of most people, as are his views on the moral equivalence of animals to humans.

Peter Singer is widely regarded as being the leading philosopher and moralist of the animal rights/liberation movement. Nevertheless, it is clear from the three examples of many we could have presented that he was obliged to grossly misrepresent the truth about animal research to support his thesis. We believe that this is a clear illustration of the moral bankruptcy and intellectual impoverishment of the animal liberation philosophy.

Charles S. Nicoll, Ph.D.
Professor of Physiology

Sharon M. Russell, Ph.D.
Research Physiologist and Lecturer

Audrey Lau, B.A.
Department of Integrative Biology
University of California
Berkeley, California

Peter Singer replies:

Charles Nicoll and Sharon Russell have previously published, in a journal that circulates among experimental biologists, an emotive call to other scientists to become “players” and not “spectators” in the defense of animal research against the “irrational zealots” of the animal liberation movement.⁶ Now, with the assistance of an academically more junior colleague, they appear to have subjected the second chapter of Animal Liberation to an unusually searching examination that has included checking all the footnotes. Again, their language is strong. They say that I use the “techniques of propagandists,” that my scholarship is a “masquerade,” and that I “grossly misrepresent the the truth about animal research.” What did they find that justifies such an attack?

Nicoll et al. turn first to a passage I quoted from John Bowlby. They are correct to say that I should have added ellipsis dots to indicate that I had not included the full first sentence. But even with the remainder of the first sentence, or the additional sentences to which Nicoll, Russell, and Lau refer, my point still stands. Harlow’s series of deprivation experiments on monkeys, conducted over many years with apparent indifference to the welfare of the monkeys involved, led to no new information about the effects of deprivation of maternal care on human infants. Bowlby himself was convinced, before Harlow’s experiments had begun, that the evidence left no room for doubt. Nicoll et al. think that Harlow’s experiments were nevertheless justifiable, not because they provided new knowledge, but because of the need to test the validity of the evidence in an animal model in order to convince skeptical physicians of the dire consequences of inadequate maternal attention.