NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Bernard Rollin, a philosopher who developed the
first university course on veterinary ethics, will speak at Vanderbilt
University March 23.
Rollin, who serves as professor of philosophy, biomedical sciences and
animal sciences and as university bioethicist at Colorado State
University, will talk about “Animal Rights as a Mainstream Phenomenon:
Animal Use and Emerging Social Ethics.” His lecture will begin at 6
p.m. in Ingram Hall on the Vanderbilt campus. A reception will precede
the lecture at 5 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public.
Rollin is a Columbia University-trained philosopher who developed a
scholarly interest in animal welfare only after accepting a job as a
philosophy professor in Colorado in the 1970s. Once there, he found
himself surrounded by something of a foreign culture: ranchers,
agriculturalists and veterinary people. In 1976, Colorado State‘s
veterinary school asked him to develop a course that applied the ethics
governing animal research the same way as those governing human
research. The resulting course has been a requirement of CSU‘s
veterinary curriculum since 1978.
Rollin takes a “common sense” approach to animal pain and
consciousness. Simply put, if cows, pigs and rats are wired the same
way as humans and respond physiologically to injury the same way, we
must assume they feel pain as humans do. Rollin is working to bridge
what he says is a critical gap that has long existed in the scientific
community: that the pursuit of science is independent of ethics or
values — that animals‘ welfare or suffering should be subservient to
science or industry as a whole.
Rollin‘s work has expanded from veterinary ethics to include animal
ethics, agricultural ethics and the ethics of animal bioengineering.
He‘s played an active role in writing ethics procedures for use by
laboratories and worked with ranchers to find alternatives to
castration and branding. He‘s a recognized leader in industry
self-regulation of livestock showing and investigations into the
control of pain and suffering in genetically engineered animals created
to model human disease.
Among Rollin‘s 10 books is Animal Rights and Human Morality,
published in 1981 and again in 1993. He has been given the Brownlee
Award for outstanding achievement in animal welfare science by the
Animal Welfare Foundation of Canada and the Distinguished Service Award
from the Colorado Veterinary Medical Association.
Rollin‘s lecture is the sixth this academic year in the ongoing
Chancellor‘s Lecture Series at Vanderbilt. The Chancellor‘s Lecture
Series serves to bring to the university and the wider Nashville
community those intellectuals who are shaping the world today. This
year‘s series concludes April 5 with a lecture by Lawrence Small,
secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. For more information about
the Chancellor‘s Lecture Series, visit www.vanderbilt.edu/chancellor/cls.
Media contact: Kara Furlong, (615) 322-NEWS
kara.c.furlong@vanderbilt.edu