At the eastern edge of Hyde Park in London stands the Animals in War Memorial, opened in 2004 to help mark the 90th anniversary of the commencement of the First World War. An inscription marks its purpose: ‘This monument is dedicated to all the animals that served and died alongside British and Allied forces in wars and campaigns throughout time.’ It is true that such an effort to memorialise animal lives lost helps to throw light upon the often unacknowledged use of animal labour in warfare over the centuries. However, an additional inscription is telling. It simply says, ‘They had no choice.’ This is both a quiet acknowledgement of the status of domestic animals in all aspects of their servility to human beings, but also a seemingly unwitting statement of an age-long characterisation of animals, in opposition to human beings, as devoid of reason and the ability to make choices.

If the monument successfully opens up questions and debates about our use of animals such as horses, dogs and pigeons in the context of warfare, it perhaps also risks obscuring the fact of the continued use of such animals, and numerous other species, in weapons testing, as well as more widely for scientific research of various kinds. For example, in 2012, the campaigning organisation the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection reported on a range of experiments carried out at a military research laboratory in the UK, including the use of live pigs to study the effects of explosive blasts on the body. Live pigs were also used to test the effects of poisonous agents such as sulphur mustard and anthrax. In the face of such experiments, then, does the presence of the war monument give a false impression of progress in our attitudes towards the uses and abuses of other animals?

One might ask the same question about the ‘three Rs’ principles for animal research: replacement, reduction, refinement. These principles seem to acknowledge that animal experimentation is undesirable, at least due to its basic conflict with animal interests and welfare. But the underlying assumption beneath this refrain is that ultimately animal experimentation is necessary.