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The issues of animal rights and the use of animals in scientific experimentation are fraught with controversy. In an effort to define the bases of such strong emotional response towards an ethical issue, this book presents the teachings of the major religions of the world concerning animals and, more specifically, their use in science. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Confucianism are represented in this collection of eight essays by religious authorities.

Scriptural writings, written and oral tradition, law, religious parables, and even folklore are used to illustrate the position of each religion on this question. When there are no specific teachings regarding the relatively recent use of animals in scientific research, conclusions are derived from the view of man’s relations with the rest of the world.

In addition to the essays dealing with specific religions, there is also a chapter detailing recent uses of animals in scientific research throughout the world. It is estimated that 500 million animals a year are sacrificed to science. This volume attempts to find out for what purposes they are used, under what conditions, and with what legal protection.

Based on a conference which explored the views of religion toward scientific experimentation on animals, this collection of essays addresses an explosive issue from a number of different perspectives. Animal Sacrifices is a fair-minded and informative discussion of a contemporary ethical dilemma.

Contributors: John Bowker, Sidney Gendin, Rabbi Dr. J. David Bleich, Andrew Linzey, James Gaffney, Al-Hafiz, B. Z. Masri, Basant K. Lal, Christopher Chapple, Rodney L. Taylor, and the editor.

Trixy is a 1904 novel by the best-selling but largely forgotten American author and women’s rights activist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. The book decries the then common practice of vivisection, or scientific experiments on live animals. In Trixy, contemporary readers can trace the roots of the early animal rights movement in Phelps’s influential campaign to introduce legislation to regulate or end this practice. Phelps not only presents a narrative polemic against the cruelty of vivisection but argues that training young doctors in it makes them bad physicians. Emily E. VanDette’s introduction demonstrates that Phelps’s protest writing, which included fiction, pamphlets, essays, and speeches, was well ahead of its time.

Though not well known today, Phelps’s 1868 spiritualist novel, The Gates Ajar, which offered a comforting view of the afterlife to readers traumatized by the Civil War, was the century’s second best-selling American novel, surpassed only by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Recently scholars and readers have begun to reexamine Phelps’s significance. As contemporary authors, including Peter Singer, Jonathan Safran Foer, Donna J. Haraway, Gary L. Francione, and Carol J. Adams, have extended her vision, they have also created new audiences for her work.

The National Institute of Health recently announced its plan to retire the fifty remaining chimpanzees held in national research facilities and place them in sanctuaries. This significant decision comes after a lengthy process of examination and debate about the ethics of animal research. For decades, proponents of such research have argued that the discoveries and benefits for humans far outweigh the costs of the traumatic effects on the animals; but today, even the researchers themselves have come to question the practice. John P. Gluck has been one of the scientists at the forefront of the movement to end research on primates, and in Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals he tells a vivid, heart-rending, personal story of how he became a vocal activist for animal protection.

Gluck begins by taking us inside the laboratory of Harry F. Harlow at the University of Wisconsin, where Gluck worked as a graduate student in the 1960s. Harlow’s primate lab became famous for his behavioral experiments in maternal deprivation and social isolation of rhesus macaques. Though trained as a behavioral scientist, Gluck finds himself unable to overlook the intense psychological and physical damage these experiments wrought on the macaques. Gluck’s sobering and moving account reveals how in this and other labs, including his own, he came to grapple with the uncomfortable justifications that many researchers were offering for their work. As his sense of conflict grows, we’re right alongside him, developing a deep empathy for the often smart and always vulnerable animals used for these experiments.

At a time of unprecedented recognition of the intellectual cognition and emotional intelligence of animals, Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals is a powerful appeal for our respect and compassion for those creatures who have unwillingly dedicated their lives to science. Through the words of someone who has inflicted pain in the name of science and come to abhor it, it’s important to know what has led this far to progress and where further inroads in animal research ethics are needed.