The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain, and Science

By Bernard E. Rollin

Book Overview

How can science teach us that animals feel no pain when our common sense observations tell us otherwise?

Bernard Rollin offers welcome insight into questions like this in his ground-breaking account of the difficult and controversial issues surrounding the use of animals. He demonstrates that the denial of animal consciousness and animal suffering is not an essential feature of a scientific approach, but rather a contingent, historical aberration that can and must be changed if science is to be both coherent and morally responsible. Widely hailed by advocates of animal welfare and scientists alike on its first appearance, the book now includes an epilogue by the author describing what has changed, and what hasn't, in this use of animals in scientific research and food production.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0826221262
• ISBN13: 9780826221261
• Release Date: July 2017
• Publisher: University of Missouri Press
• Length: 348 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.9" x 8.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary

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.