Within the last several years, the animal-welfare movement has been
divided between those who merely hope to protect animals and those who
would like to extend to animals the same rights and recognition that
have been gained by minorities, women, and homosexuals. For people who
believe that animals have rights, or deserve to have them, an ordinance
regulating the use of laboratory animals is only a small step toward the
establishment of a society in which mankind lives in a different
relation to the rest of the animal kingdom.
In The Rights of Mice, Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning
author of The Looming Tower and Going Clear, takes listeners inside
the war between science and anti-vivisection raging across the city of
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and its great educational institutions,
Harvard and MIT. As animal rights activists attempt to push through city
council an ordinance restricting the use of animals in laboratory
testing, leaders in the science and medical communities brace for a
fight. The Rights of Mice was originally published in New England
Monthly, August 1987.
