The doctor and TV presenter Eckart von Hirschhausen was involved in animal experiments during his medical training – and regrets it today. “Since then I have avoided pork,” he said in a debate in the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit”. “I hope the pigs in heaven that I transported there for science have forgiven me.” In the article, Hirschhausen argues with a pig farmer from Lower Saxony about the topics of meat consumption and factory farming.
In the double interview, the science journalist criticizes, among other things, ecological damage caused by factory farming – and the potentially dangerous consequences of excessive meat consumption. “There is no medical reason for consumption these days,” said Hirschhausen. “On the contrary: excessive meat consumption promotes cancer, gout and cardiovascular diseases.” He only eats a little meat himself – “maybe every two weeks – if I know where it comes from and how the animal lived. But eating meat is no longer part of my cultural identity.”
About the animal experiments, he said that he was involved in them more than 30 years ago for his doctoral thesis in Heidelberg. “It was about new treatment options for blood poisoning. For this purpose, around 20 pigs were put under anesthesia and never woke up. Unfortunately, the whole thing yielded little insight and it really affected me at the time.”