ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Animals Welfare Acts and Utilization Limits in Islam Preface Need for health is among the basic needs in human life. Man’s physical and mental health is secured by two methods of prevention and treatment. In the first method, the pathogenic factors are diagnosed and rendered inactive, or minimized to the lowest possible level, so that one may go on living with a healthy body and soul.

In the second method, however, it is attempted to bring the pathogenic factors under control and, in the best of conditions, destroy it so that one may regain one’s health. Although apparently seem two different ways, hygiene and treatment are supplementary to each other and in any case, the diagnosis of diseases is necessary.

Diagnosing the factors of diseases and the way they function in the body, on the one hand, and the way to neutralize them, on the other, is the main duty of medical science.

In order to carry out this essential duty, medicine requires an environment enabling it to recognize the emerging process of the factors of diseases, the way they function, and finally the body’s reaction against them; and then, by arranging the hygienic principles and regulations, to eliminate the grounds for their emergence, and in case of emerging, eradicate them.

Naturally, the environment for such discovering cannot be the very body of a human being; because, regardless of its contradiction with the objectives of medicine, which include protecting and taking care of man’s health, it is incompatible with the status and self-esteem of human beings, as well. Thus, the need for vivisection of animals for research purposes is increasingly felt in the medical community.

Although the need for laboratory animals is understandable from the very early days that medicine turned from description of disease towards diagnosis of disease; with the passage of time, however, the question was raised, first in the minds of the physicians and then in the minds of the jurists, as to whether man is permitted to jeopardize animals’ health in order to maintain their own health condition in the two areas of health and treatment.

It was then that, with the entrance of ethico-judicial thinking into the realm of medical studies and research, the ground was paved for the appearance of a new interdisciplinary science called bio-ethics.