Stories from the Edge - Volunteer Now

was lampooned by the popular press of his day, which carried crude cartoons of Darwin with our chimpanzee cousins andother primates. Despite the cartoonists intentions they were depicting the reality more than they thought. Human beingsalleged dominion over the animal kingdom was now seriously being questioned albeit on a small scale.The debate over the moral status of animals rumbled on below the veneer of the commonplace until the 1970s when aspate of books and articles lead to the debate resurfacing with a vengeance. Australian philosopher Peter Singer comparedspeciesism with racism, sexism and other 'isms that discriminated between human animals. Singer in one fell swoop,overturned 2000 years of negative attitudes towards non-human animals. He argued that there was no good reason forrefusing to extend the basic principle of equality to other animals. Singer objected to factory farming and animalexperimentation and urged that there were nutritionally adequate alternatives to eating meat. Subsequently vegetarianismwas the only ethically acceptable diet. In the case of animal experimentation Singer uses an old ploy once used by DeanSwift when he satirically suggested that the children of the starving Irish should be fattened up and used as human food.This time Singer insists that humans should ask if whether the same experiment, such as forcing dogs to smoke 60cigarettes a day, should be carried out on orphan children. He said that the young children would be at the same mentallevel as adult chimpanzees. Ifthe answer is yes, then and onlythen can the experimenters say“Pat Nolan doesn’t give hisbeloved cats and dogs awayto any Tom, Dick or Sheila”they are not ‘speciesist’ andprejudiced against giving theinterests of non-humananimals a similar weight to theinterests of humans. Now tryexperimenting on orphanedchildren. Pat Nolan is quick topoint out that this would bechild abuse of the worst sort.Other philosophers such as Tom Regan argue that all animals, or at least mammals above a certain age, are 'subjects oflife' and therefore have basic rights. Eating animals or experimenting on them is violating those rights. Such argumentshave given rise to heated and emotional debates but often these break out of the academic cloisters and cause mayhemon the streets. Anarchist and animal rights groups target companies involved in animal experiments. Some more violentanimal rights groups have blown up and destroyed laboratories. Pat Nolan wants no part of such behaviour.In the 20th Century animal rights philosophy has had a unique position in that it has caused social movements. It wasaround the late 1970s, when the animal rights movements were inching forward, that a stray kitten was brought toPat Nolan's door. He had been a local factory worker. He says he still remembers the animal’s small face and big eyes. Thehelplessness of the fellow creature moved something inside Pat. That one stray stayed and was soon joined by others asPat's reputation spread throughout Enniskillen and surrounding villages that make up the sprawl of County Fermanagh. Henow has over 100 cats and dogs abandoned by their owners. This, Pat Nolan believes is animal abuse at one end of a