Paul McCartney recently gave a BBC
radio interview in which he seemed to step back from his, and his deceased
wife Linda’s, hard core animal rights position on animal experimentation.
“I’m finding out now,”
McCartney told the BBC, “that there is quite a lot of animal experimentation
— some of it I suppose absolutely necessary when you come down to the
final tests before people.”
McCartney made comments about his
wife’s treatment for breast Cancer that indicate Linda never knew the
drugs she was taking had been tested on animals. He said that doctors
treating Linda gave the impression that the drugs they prescribed had
not been tested in animals.
“If they tell you ‘It’s ok
to have this because we didn’t test it on animals’ then you are going
to believe them,” McCartney said.
In other words, all this time Paul
and Linda McCartney went around advocating for animal rights and against
animal experimentation, they were so ignorant of the topic that they didn’t
even know the fundamental basics about the use of animals in drug development
and testing.
This is the state of the
animal rights movement’s knowledge of the use of animals by medical researchers.