The Unheeded Cry

By Bernard E. Rollin

Book Overview

How can science teach us that animals feel no pain when our common sense observations tell us otherwise? Rollin offers a welcome insight into questions like this in The Unheeded Cry , a rare, reasonable account of the difficult and controversial issues surrounding the images of animals found in science. Widely hailed on its first appearance, the book is updated here to include recent changes in thinking and practice in this fast growing field. With anecdotes and a dose of humour, Rollin pokes holes in the neutral, objective, and value-free stance of animal-using scientists in the positivist tradition. He shows how this stance leads to the denial of the existence of animal consciousness and pain, and he points out the consequences. His work will help professionals and amateurs with an interest in the moral status of animals in their attempts to penetrate the fortress of scientific ideology and practice, and to effect change.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813825768
• ISBN13: 9780813825762
• Release Date: May 1998
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Length: 330 Pages
• Weight: 1.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.4" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Common sense welfare beats scientific justification

FIVE, or even six, stars for the argumentation, but I have given four stars only because it will take a fair amount of scientific knowledge and stamina to read. Rollin is well known in the animal welfare field. His argument, developed in repeated minute detail, is that scientists who experiment on animals are so closed off from reality, and have such a vested interest in deluding themselves that animals don't suffer, that they are the only people who can't see the blindingly obvious - that animals feel pain pretty much the same way that we do. For scientists, and especially anyone dealing with animals in any way, I would consider this book mandatory reading. It counterbalances all the dry science about how animals work with a a good look at how they think.For non-graduates it's too technical. Words like paradigmatic and ontological come thick and fast.