- guardian.co.uk, Thursday February 1 2001 02.28 GMT
The reason no one is protesting is that the slaughter is being undertaken (according to a survey this week) by the domestic cat. It appears to have acquired a de facto licence to kill without raising any moral problems about the rights of the mice and other victims to stay alive. Most of the time the killings carried out by cats are done in a gratuitously brutal way and inflict lingering pain on the victims - unlike the practice of science laboratories which put them to sleep with the aim of saving human lives or alleviating pain. And possibly animals used for experiments have a longer life than young rodents picked off at random by marauding moggies.
If the ultimate aim of activists is to prolong and improve the lives of creatures at risk, rather than to inflict injury on humans experimenting on animals, then there are a number of non-violent options open to them. One would be to campaign peacefully to reduce the number of cats bred for domestic purposes.
But this would not be very popular, as cats are valued pets and help households to cope with rodent infestation. Another would be to campaign for legislation to compel cat owners to put bells around the necks of all domestic cats to warn potential victims of their approach. This could save hundreds of thousand more lives than targeting mice and rats at research centres, many of whom would not have come into this world at all but for the needs of research. At a stroke, this could unite animal rights activists with voters everywhere who could live happily ever after. Moreover, pigs might fly.
