Robert Garner

Robert Garner is a reader in politics at the University at Leicester, England, and has published widely on animal rights and environmental politics. In the following viewpoint, Garner asserts that animals have a higher moral status than society has traditionally granted them, which makes animal experimentation unethical. He contends that using animals to benefit people amounts to speciesism—arbitrarily valuing humans over animals merely because they are humans. Garner rejects the claim that animal experimentation has been responsible for important medical breakthroughs, pointing out that no one knows whether those innovations could have occurred without the use of animals.

As you read, consider the following questions:

1. According to Garner, how do the most enlightened nations justify animal experimentation"
2. How does the United Kingdom reduce the amount of trivial animal testing, according to the author"
3. In the author&rsquo...