BOOKS: Animals: Why They Must Not Be Brutalized
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1995:
Animals:
Why They Must
Not Be Brutalized
by J.B. Suconik
Nuark Publishing (30 Amberwood
Parkway, Ashland, OH 44805),
2002. 160 pages, hard cover. $28.00
Suconik’s book is basically a
moral treatise against the arguments com-
monly used to support vivisection. Give us
the whole balance sheet, he implores vivi-
section apologists, not just an item from the
profit and loss account. Then we can accu-
rately determine the legitimacy of the whole
enterprise.
Don’t just argue, for example,
that without biomedical research on animals
we can forget about a cure for AIDS. Tell
us how much it will cost, how many ani-
mals will be used, how cruel are the proce-
dures and what are the alternatives.
Sure, if you spend millions tor-
menting animals for years you are bound to
learn something, sooner or later. But if
better ways exist, then the millions spent on
vivisection will have been wastefully
employed.
Suconik describes biomedical
research as “the biological science version
of medieval torture to extract information.”
The second half of Suconik’s book
offers harrowing examples of egregious cru-
elty endured by animals around the world.
Suconik provides some deep
thinking and some trenchant criticisms.
Unfortunately, Suconik com-
pounds the often turgid nature of moral
argument with sentences such as, “the read-
er will discover heretofore unnoticed, but
relevant facts and rebuttal (truth) to disprove
fallacious and misleading rhetoric, and a
myriad of need to be known examples of the
unceasing human tyranny of animals.”
––Chris Mercer
