BOOKS

Face aux animaux – Nos émotions, nos préjugés, nos ambivalences, by Laurent Bègue-Shankland – Odile Jacob, 2022, 352 p.

This book tells the story of our very special relationship with animals. From the very beginning, animals have both fascinated and terrorized us. They have played a central role in past civilizations, and still play a fundamental role for humans today. Many of us invest all our affection and emotions in them.
This is also a wide-ranging account of our relationship with animals, based on the latest knowledge. To uncover the bonds that bind us, this book takes new paths that reveal our attachments and their ambivalences.
By revisiting Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment on submission to authority, in which ordinary men and women are led to harm a laboratory animal (in reality a robot) for science, Laurent Bègue-Shankland, Professor of Social Psychology at Grenoble-Alpes University, renews the analysis of the influences of our behavior towards animals. He reveals the individual profiles and circumstances that lead to a reduction in our empathy for animals.
This book shows that our relationships with animals, from attachment to mistreatment, have a profound impact on our identity and our relationship with others.

Quelles alternatives en expérimentation animale? Practiques et Ethique

Collective work, coordinators: F. Marano, P. Hubert, L. Geoffroy, H. Juin, Editions QUAE, 2020, 186 p.

The use of animals for fundamental or applied research, for the development of medicines and vaccines, and for the safety of chemical products, is the subject of lively debate. Scientific and ethical reflection on the use of animals in laboratories has led to the development of “alternative methods in animal experimentation”. This collective book presents the latest developments in these methods, as well as the ethical and regulatory issues they raise.

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La cause des animaux. Pour un destin commun, by Florence Burgat, Ed. Buchet – Chastel, 2015, 112p.

We share our ordinary lives with animals. By choice, dogs and cats inhabit our homes; indeed, insects, pigeons and rats reside in the city. It would be easy to forget those we eat, those whose skins we wear, and those on whom the cleaning products and medicines we use have been tested.

We often prefer to ignore the fact that a life had to be interrupted in order to be able to enjoy the finished products we derive from it. Moreover, the killing of animals is sometimes unsuspected and counter-intuitive – how can we guess the presence of pork gelatin in a sorbet? – or remains imperceptible because it is only one stage in a manufacturing process, as is the case for all substances tested on animals.

Through the study of seemingly insignificant gestures or large-scale practices – factory farming and animal experimentation – the author prompts us to ask ourselves: what do these practices teach us? Are they justifiable? Are they just? Why does legal recognition of the sentient nature of animals provoke such debate?

The case for animal Rights, by Tom Regan, University of California Press, 1983

Animals have rights. This is the thesis defended by Tom Regan in this seminal work, a major and influential contribution to contemporary moral reflection. Far from being thoughtless, as Descartes asserted, the animals we eat, hunt or deliver to scientific experiments are aware of the world. Their minds are imbued with beliefs and desires, memories and expectations. As such, they are beings endowed with a moral value of their own, independently of any utility they may have for us. It is not simply out of compassion for their suffering, but out of respect for this value that we must treat them with respect. Regan’s theory is the most elaborate and radical philosophical formulation of an animal rights ethic. It demands coherence: if we reject the exploitation of humans, we must also denounce the exploitation of non-human animals. Justice demands the abolition of breeding, hunting and experimentation.

Militantisme, politique et droits des animaux, by Melvin Josse, Ed. Droits des animaux, 2013, 104 p.

Does the French animal rights movement have the means to achieve its goals, however diverse they may be depending on the direction chosen by its players? Does it even question its effectiveness? While no one can deny that the recent wave of animal rights movements has made a significant contribution to the emergence of the animal issue in the media as a “social issue”, it must also be acknowledged that, more often than not, it has come up against indifference or hostility on the part of political figures who have prevented significant legislative advances in our country. By comparing the strategies developed by the animal rights movement in the political arena in various European countries, this study provides a diagnosis and outlook for the animal cause, particularly in France.

La douleur des bêtes: la polémique sur la vivisection au XIXème siècle en France, by Jean-Yves Bory, Ed. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013, 360 p.

Vivisection became a professional practice in the 19th century. Generating a veritable craze at the beginning of the century, it continued to develop until it became an institutionalized paradigm in 1880. At the same time, it was increasingly contested by some vivisectors themselves, and later by medical publicists, animal protectors and the general public organized into associations. Yet the vivisection ultras were victorious, successfully claiming total freedom for their practices. Why did vivisection develop the way it did in 19th-century France? Why was it contested? How did its victory come about? The aim of this book is twofold: to give an account of the facts through historical narrative, and to break away from the dominant viewpoint of the victors through interpretation. A little-known and much-maligned subject, the controversy over vivisection and animal experimentation offers an opportunity for a symmetrical social history that breaks with the great tradition of the history of ideas and rehabilitates the vanquished: antivivisectionists and animals.

Expérimentation animale, entre droit et liberté, by Jean-Pierre Marguenaud, Ed. Quae, 2011, 78 p.

Animal experimentation is generally considered indispensable to the progress of science and, consequently, to the happiness of humanity. This is why, until 1968, it was left to the most absolute freedom.

However, the law, driven by the evolution of mores and ideas, is infiltrating everywhere, and animal experimentation no longer escapes its influence. The European Union’s new directive of September 22, 2010 on protection of animals used for scientific purposes, whose main effects will be felt from 2013, has angered animal protection associations on many points.

However, it marks a new conquest of the law, creating the conditions for its replacement by ethics, which until now has been the main basis for the protection of animals used in experimentation.