When faced with the suffering of others, many people instinctively tend to turn away. \u201cAttention has become a moral currency,\u201d writes Bernard A. Saltzman in his new book Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture (2026). For Saltzman, turning a blind eye is \u201cdeeply embedded in the experience of being human.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is poignantly illustrated in the painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, circa 1558, attributed to Flemish painter Peter Bruegel the Elder, in which the artist depicts the myth of Daedalus and Icarus from Book VIII of Ovid\u2019s Metamorphoses. Throughout the centuries, the myth has captured the imagination<\/a> of many writers and painters, including the 16th-century Swedish painter Joos de Momper, and even Picasso, whose 1958 version is at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris.<\/p>\n In Ovid\u2019s rendition, the ploughman, fisherman, and shepherd continue their work, despite the amazing sight of a boy falling from the sky. The painting is further immortalized in W.H. Auden\u2019s poem Mus\u00e9e des Beaux Arts: \u201cAbout suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters, how it takes place\/while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along\u2026how everything just turns away\/Quite leisurely from the disaster\u2026\u201d (Karasu, 2009).<\/p>\n Alternatively, some can just as easily \u201cengage in doomsday scrolling,\u201d develop a prurient fascination with suffering, and become unable to turn away (Saltzman). We live, writes Susan Sontag, in a \u201csociety of spectacle\u201d and can become voyeurs \u201cregarding the pain of others\u201d (2003).<\/p>\n Whether we turn toward or turn away from the misfortunes of others, either gesture is a \u201cpoetic way of enacting feeling\u201d (Saltzman).<\/p>\n Viewing suffering can bring compassion, a complex emotion<\/a> that involves not only the emotional response of recognizing the suffering of others but also a desire and wish to alleviate that suffering. But compassion, cautions Sontag, is an \u201cunstable emotion,\u201d and people can become inured to the horror and develop \u201cmoral or emotional anesthesia\u201d: although there may be both shame<\/a> and shock initially, the shock can wear off.<\/p>\n Most who write about compassion focus on the human component, but what about compassion for animals, and particularly those animals used in research?<\/p>\n Animals in research<\/p>\n The use of animals in scientific research has a long history, dating<\/a> back at least to the Greeks and Romans when Aristotle and later Galen experimented on animals (Hajar, 2011). Nineteenth-century Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch used animal models (Fr\u00fchwein and Paul, 2025). <\/p>\n Claude Bernard, considered the father of physiology, was a major proponent of vivisection (i.e., the dissection of living animals) (LaFollette and Shanks, 2008), as was, of course, Pavlov and his conditioning experiments with dogs. In more recent years, Jonas Salk used tissue from the kidneys of monkeys to develop his vaccine for polio (Shampo and Kyle, 1998).<\/p>\n There is no question that animal experimentation has led to significant breakthroughs in medicine and is considerably more acceptable than the egregious ethical violations committed not only by the Nazis, who conducted experimentation on concentration<\/a> camp victims (Carbone, 2026), but also by researchers in the U.S. who, for 40 years, intentionally withheld treatment from Black men in the Tuskegee syphilis study (Tobin, 2022). These abuses led to major reforms in the oversight of human research and the importance of informed consent (Carbone).<\/p>\n The use of animals in research has not been without controversy, particularly stemming from investigations that uncovered overt abuse and mistreatment of animals. Even Harry Harlow, famous for his cloth and wire-covered surrogate experiments with his infant monkeys, was accused of cruelty and torture for his “pit of despair” (Blum, 2011; Karasu, 2020). <\/p>\n PETA, i.e., People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, whose motto is “Animals are not ours to experiment on, eat, wear, or use for entertainment, or abuse in any way,” was established in 1980. Its staff has gone undercover to document major animal abuse, though its approach of throwing red paint on those who wear fur remains controversial.<\/p>\n Larry Carbone, a laboratory veterinarian for over 40 years, explores the many complexities involved in the use of animals, from primates to fleas, for scientific research in his recently published book (Morton, 2026).<\/p>\n Carbone writes, “A lab vet goes from someone who makes sick animals healthy to someone who makes healthy animals sick.” Those who work with lab animals may experience considerable stress<\/a>, sometimes related to what has been called the “caring-killing paradox” (LaFollette et al., 2020).<\/p>\n In the U.S., the NIH and the U.S. Department of Agriculture oversee lab animals, but no one knows how many animals are used by labs. There has been legislation, such as the Animal Welfare Act of 1966, to protect lab animals, but well over 99 percent of animals were (and are still) not covered. Mice, the most commonly used lab animal, rats, and fish are “not animals” under this Act nor under the 1985 Congressional update that established animal ethics committees to self-regulate<\/a> some studies (Carbone).<\/p>\n Furthermore, Carbone describes what animal ethicists call speciesism, namely giving preferential treatment, such as allowing exercise for some animals, such as dogs, based more on people’s emotional attachments to them rather than what an animal may require. Writes Carbone, “The great conundrum in animal research…we want animals whose bodies and diseases most resemble us humans, but whose mental and emotional capabilities are so different that we commit no sin in harming them.”<\/p>\n And after Jane Goodall’s research with her chimps, primates evolved “from subhuman primates to nonhuman primates,” and though they are social, they could still be kept alone in a cage for years without exercise. <\/p>\n