Post hoc, propter hoc - a common fallacy of vivisection apologists
The reason why so many claims made by defenders of vivisection are
unfounded or plainly false is, I think, the following.
They make the mistake of thinking that "post hoc, propter hoc" (after
that, therefore because of that).
For example, they may say that a certain cure or drug has been found
"because" of animal experimentation, when in fact it could be that it
was simply found "after" (unfortunately) time and money was devoted to
animal experimentation.
The example of effective rehydration for diarrhea (mentioned some time
ago in a letter to Peter Singer in The New York Book Review) seems a
good one.
Bruce Max Feldmann says in answer to the letter to Singer:
"Rothman claims that oral fluid rehydration of Third World diarrheas
is a treatment `based on many years of animal experimentation.' To the
contrary, in the three seminal papers on oral fluid rehydration for
severe human diarrhea there is not a single reference to oral fluid
rehydration experiments in laboratory animals with diarrhea. What
really happened was that some more-creative-than-average health
professionals said to themselves: 'Hey, wait a minute. Third World
people are dying right and left from diarrheas. And intravenous fluids
and fluid administration equipment necessary to save their lives are
not affordable. So why not at least try oral fluids, even though we've
been taught that they aren't much use in severe diarrhea. Maybe
they'll help.'
"Well, oral fluids did help--a lot; tens of thousands of lives have
been saved as a result. So Rothman's example to argue the importance
of animal research illustrates precisely the opposite point --
Singer's point: more of the world's limited medical resources should
be allocated to immediate human life-saving efforts and to
non-sentient animal research; less resources should be expended on
animal research of questionable ethics and dubious value."
Here's a good example of how probably someone had jumped to the
conclusion that a treatment had been found due to animal
experimentation, because maybe there had been considerable resources
devoted to animal experiments, but the actual solution was found in
another way.
So a link which did not exist was established.
I suspect many cases will be of the same kind.
Post hoc, propter hoc is a very common fallacy.
We tend to assume that, if a fact follows another fact, the second was
caused by the first.
See, for example, the idea that psychotherapy "cures" only because
people after some time feel better: they probably would anyway
(spontaneous remission).
The way vivisection apologists talk about animal experiments sometimes
is a bit like this.
Suppose that someone, a traveller, has taken a long and tortuous route
to get somewhere, not knowing that there was in fact a simpler,
direct, shorter one.
He may then say that it was only thanks to that long route that he got
to his destination.
Well, it's true. But the fact that he actually got to his destination
through that route says nothing about alternative routes he might have
taken which could have been more effective.
In the case of animal experimentation, furthermore, in many cases the
link between the route taken and the results achieved is not so
obvious but is on the contrary highly speculative.
When alternative methods are looked for, they are often found: I said
"often", but I would say "always".
A well known example. Years ago the campaigner Henry Spira tackled
Revlon over their use of rabbits to test cosmetics for potential eye
damage, and exerted enough pressure to persuade the company to put
$750,000 into the search for alternatives. Having seen the public
relations disaster that Revlon had narrowly averted, Avon,
Bristol-Myers and other major American cosmetics corporations soon
followed suit. Though it took ten years for the research to yield the
desired results, they did find what they were looking for: alternative
methods. And so many cosmetics corporations can now truthfully state
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