by Joy Mench

About the author: Joy Mench is a professor of animal science at the University of California at Davis.

After four months’ experience [working as an assistant in a physiology laboratory conducting experiments on dogs and rabbits], I am of the opinion that not one of those experiments on animals was justified or necessary. The idea of the good of humanity was simply out of the question . . . the great aim being to keep up with, or get ahead of, one’s contemporaries in science, even at the price of an incalculable amount of torture needlessly and iniquitously inflicted on the poor animals.

—Letter from English physician George Hoggan, The Morning Post, 1875

Every year in Britain alone millions of animals suffer and die in laboratory experiments. . . . In the past, people had to rely on bland assurances that...