Between shouting matches and
silence: fostering real dialogue with
the public about animal research.
Janet D. Stemwedel
San José State University
dr.freeride@gmail.com
The big questions:
1. How to shift from the current state of play to
more productive engagement (especially
dialogue)?
2. Who, in particular, to try to include in a
dialogue of this sort? (Who to try to reach
with such dialogue?)
Why dialogue?
Dialogue is neither a high school debate nor a
political point-scoring battle!
Dialogue involves laying out positions, questions
and really engaging with them.
Opponents vs. dialogue partners with shared
responsibilities.
Dialogue differs from debate.
• Debate assumes a winner and a loser.
• Dialogue assumes space to articulate your
position and your reasons for your position.
• Dialogue also assumes listening, asking
questions.
• Goal is better understanding of everyone’s
positions and reasons.
• Disagreement at conclusion doesn’t mean
you’re doing it wrong!
Why bother with dialogue?
• Balancing competing interests is hard (and so
requires good deliberation).
• Better way to deal with disagreements than
hoping they’ll go away (or turning to
violence).
• Keeps participants in touch with the
complexities.
• Makes it harder to dehumanize “the other
side”.
A good place to see committed
dialogue about animal research:
The IACUC
Explicitly includes a range of interests and points
of view.
In a broader sense, the dialogue includes not
just committee members but also PIs,
institutions, governmental agencies.
Dialogues can be challenging!
• Require serious thought (even about your own
position and reasons)
• Commit you to taking your dialogue partner
seriously
• Usually need something like ground rules and
a facillitator
Some frequent impediments to this
kind of dialogue:
1. Presumptive mistrust of “the other side”
2. Disagreements about the facts
3. Tendency to tangle a number of issues
together
4. Fuzziness about what’s actually being
claimed
5. Impact of tactics on how the positions and
the people advocating them are viewed
Scientists and animal activists see
different facts.
“Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but
not their own facts.”
• Should be clear about where our facts come
from.
• Should be honest about where there are gaps
in our knowledge. (Modeling intellectual
honesty discourages goalpost shifting.)
Being clear about your positions.
• Inadequate regulations or inadequate
compliance?
• Animal welfare or animal rights?
• What values are competing and how they get
prioritized.
Recognizing the range of positions
available, or represented.
The regulatory status quo is a
compromise position!
(Regulations reflect something like
public will here.)
Tying together issues that are
separable.
• E.g., Scientific questions that can’t be
answered without animal use vs. moral status
of animals.
• Separating them may help you find (limited)
areas of agreement, even common ground
moving forward.
Tactics matter.
Hard to give a position fair consideration if it is
routinely advanced using questionable tactics
(especially violence and intimidation).
Tactics matter.
Beyond the tactics I myself use to work toward
the goal, what other tactics do I accept when
used by others?
If your main concern is achieving the goal, are
there tactics that you yourself would not
choose that won't bother you terribly is the
goal is achieved?
Tactics matter.
If you can accept the end result accomplished
with these tactics (even if others were the
ones who actually used these tactics), is this
relevantly different from supporting them?
Work to even make safe dialogue
possible:
• Exposing the tactics that shut down
willingness to participate in dialogue.
• Getting people to stop using those tactics (and
to actively work against others' use of them
rather than passively accepting whatever
ground seems to be gained through their use).
• Promoting rational engagement (especially
where there is real disagreement)
With whom should we be in dialogue?
• Who do we want to reach?
• Who can we reach?
• Whose concerns ought we to hear?
• Don’t want to waste time with people who
won’t argue in good faith.
Drawing people in from the sidelines.
“There are times when I have not trusted my
actual dialogue ‘partner’ … but where at the
same time I knew that behind/beside/near
that person, there were other people who I
did trust slightly more – and so, I wasn’t really
addressing my ostensible partner so much as I
was addressing a range of people including
that person.”
People worth drawing in:
• The general public
• Students in classes that include animal use,
knowledge built from animal research
• Activists who are not extremists
• Members of the scientific community who
aren’t on the front lines
Whose responsibility to enter into
dialogue?
• Personal safety is not a trivial concern
• But, leaving your position to people who don’t
value dialogue (or who rely on problematic
tactics) has a cost
“Playing a zone” in engaging with the public.
(Plenty of dialogue opportunities closer to home
can support engagement with larger public)
It’s OK to:
• Voice concerns (about anticipated goalpost
moving, whether dialogue partner will
understand your point, etc.)
• Acknowledge anger, fear, frustration
• Acknowledge where your knowledge is gappy
• Identify areas of disagreement that are
unlikely to be resolved by further facts or
rational argument
What counts as a positive outcome?
• Understanding each other better is real
progress.
• Understanding the positions and reasons
(even our own) better is progress.
• Seeing the humanity of the people with whom
we’re disagreeing is progress.