Recent news about animal rights activists and a counter movement to promote the use of animals in medical experiments has shown how the debate over whether animals should be made to suffer for the advancement of humanity has been unecessarily dichotomised.

On the one side there are people who hold animals to have the same rights as humans and that they should not be subjected to suffering in medical experiments.

Most people are of the opposing view that man has dominion over animals and that their suffering, while regrettable is necessary to prevent the suffering of people.  Animals must be sacrificed to the great god Science so that new medicines can be developed and human illnesses prevented.

The Opus Diaboli approach, unsurprisingly, looks at this in a third way.

Firstly, as has been found on numerous occasions, humans are not white mice: experiments on animals, even the higher primates, do not readily produce results that accurately reflect the effects of compounds on people.

Secondly, there has been an unrealistic division of the parties involved here:- there are humans which are percieved as being ‘sacred’ and the animals which are percieved as being expendible.

In truth there is a third and potentially useful group here which could end all this need for animal suffering, protests, digging up people’s dead grannies etc…

Are our jails not simply crammed with people who by their actions and crimes against society, have made themselves much more worthy of being sacrificed on the altar of scientific advancement?

Is it not eminently more sensible, and indeed moral, to experiment on those humans who have put themselves beyond the pale by murder, rape, and other inhuman acts?   These criminals have a debt to pay to society and therefore deserve to suffer much more than an animal which has done nothing to harm anyone.

We should consider testing shampoo by dropping it into the eyes of rabbits when and only when the jails have been emptied.