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I can’t help but feel a little bad about the mass amputation happening in these labs. Of course these are lower animals, but don’t we lose a little of our human

I can’t help but feel a little bad about the mass amputation happening in these labs. Of course these are lower animals, but don’t we lose a little of our humanity doing this?

andai 8y ago
I am roughly equal parts excited and sad.
yani 8y ago
If they regrow it and it is painless... it is like removing the wool from a sheep.
- callesgg 8y ago
  Why would it be painless?
  - jhoh 8y ago
    If the chances of dying after loosing a limb aren't very high it just doesn't make sense to develop (extreme) pain from an evolutionary perspective.
    - jazoom 8y ago
      The chance of me dying from placing my finger on the stove is 0%, but I assure you the pain is severe.
      - smt88 8y ago
        You can't regrow your finger, and having working fingers would've been useful for survival for nearly 100% of your ancestors (the ones that had digits, that is). There are lizards who lose their tails painlessly as a way to escape predators. If they felt pain in that situation, they might die, so it would've been selected out over time.
    - jobigoud 8y ago
      Yeah but regrowing limbs arrived after, it's built on top of their tetrapod ancestry. So it's entirely possible that pain is still here as a leftover from when it was a very critical condition.
- sxdx 8y ago
  They have a nervous system and DO feel pain, afaik the extent of pain they feel is not really known. A vet had to amputate a limb of an Axolotl I keep as a pet because he got into a fight with another one and he did not even finch.
cup-of-tea 8y ago
But we kill millions of animals every day for eating and not because we need to, because we enjoy it.
- nojvek 8y ago
  This x 1000. The chicken, beef and pork you eat is probably treated worse than the mice in the labs. If you at all care about Animal welfare then spend sometime researching into Animal farming. It gets dark pretty fast. Most people don’t know how their chicken gets to the shelves.
  - 52-6F-62 8y ago
    I think this is more of a problem in certain parts of the world than it is in others—particularly those parts that receive large subsidies to increase production capacity so as to fuel discounts that would draw otherwise hesitant commercial activity.
smt88 8y ago
This is an important question, but it's also been debated to death in the scientific community. I have a friend who raises mice and then has to break their necks to euthanize them before experimenting on them. Another of my friends has to give mice cancer. The former friend's lab has come up with life-changing treatments for muscular diseases, and the latter friend is helping to develop immunotherapy methods. While it's awful to think about the price, it's important to think about why the price is paid and how much suffering can be prevented. Another note: there are strict codes of ethics for how animals are treated in labs, so in most reputable organizations, the suffering is as minimal as possible (sometimes no suffering at all).
- nojvek 8y ago
  I really wish there was more oversight into Animals being used for testing. Dogs are probably the most humane treated animals on the planet. I wish other animals got the similar treatment as well. Would love to read some of those debates. Don’t get me wrong. I am in support for using mice for medical reasons.
  - trombonechamp 8y ago
    In most countries, there is an ungodly large amount of oversight that goes into animals used in scientific research. The problem is that when the media reports animal testing, they skew the facts in order to make them sound dramatic, when in reality animal well-being is taken very seriously. Lab mice in general live much better lives than your pet mouse.
    - nojvek 8y ago
      I didn’t know about this. I think my impressions have mostly come from movies like “planet of apes” so yes, they have been skewed by media.
  - dsajames 8y ago
    If you care about animal cruelty, the real problems are habitat loss leading the starvation and habitat loss, followed by overhunting/fishing, followed by industrial scale agribusiness where animals are kept in horrible conditions for life, followed by shitty slaughter practices of some small scale farmers, then shitty pet owners, and waaaay down at the bottom is researchers who sometimes treat the animals poorly.
jasonszhao 8y ago
The article mentions planaria, a type of flatworm that can regenerate from a small piece of tissue. Many experiments with these animals involve cutting them up various ways.[0] I agree that animal testing is integral to modern medicine, but I also agree with the parent that unnecessarily inflicting pain on even lower animals reflects badly on humanity. How many of these experiments are actually necessary? Do research institutions make the researcher convince them that the suffering is really necessary for medicine, rather than merely to satisfy some curiosity? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian#Regeneration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian#Regeneration As a side note, the next section of the Wikipedia article, describes even more grotesque experiments.

I can’t help but feel a little bad about the mass amputation happening in these labs. Of course these are lower animals, but don’t we lose a little of our humanity doing this?

andai 8y ago

I am roughly equal parts excited and sad.

yani 8y ago

If they regrow it and it is painless... it is like removing the wool from a sheep.

callesgg 8y ago
Why would it be painless?
- jhoh 8y ago
  If the chances of dying after loosing a limb aren't very high it just doesn't make sense to develop (extreme) pain from an evolutionary perspective.
  - jazoom 8y ago
    The chance of me dying from placing my finger on the stove is 0%, but I assure you the pain is severe.
    - smt88 8y ago
      You can't regrow your finger, and having working fingers would've been useful for survival for nearly 100% of your ancestors (the ones that had digits, that is). There are lizards who lose their tails painlessly as a way to escape predators. If they felt pain in that situation, they might die, so it would've been selected out over time.
  - jobigoud 8y ago
    Yeah but regrowing limbs arrived after, it's built on top of their tetrapod ancestry. So it's entirely possible that pain is still here as a leftover from when it was a very critical condition.
sxdx 8y ago
They have a nervous system and DO feel pain, afaik the extent of pain they feel is not really known. A vet had to amputate a limb of an Axolotl I keep as a pet because he got into a fight with another one and he did not even finch.

cup-of-tea 8y ago

But we kill millions of animals every day for eating and not because we need to, because we enjoy it.

nojvek 8y ago
This x 1000. The chicken, beef and pork you eat is probably treated worse than the mice in the labs. If you at all care about Animal welfare then spend sometime researching into Animal farming. It gets dark pretty fast. Most people don’t know how their chicken gets to the shelves.
- 52-6F-62 8y ago
  I think this is more of a problem in certain parts of the world than it is in others—particularly those parts that receive large subsidies to increase production capacity so as to fuel discounts that would draw otherwise hesitant commercial activity.

smt88 8y ago

This is an important question, but it's also been debated to death in the scientific community. I have a friend who raises mice and then has to break their necks to euthanize them before experimenting on them. Another of my friends has to give mice cancer. The former friend's lab has come up with life-changing treatments for muscular diseases, and the latter friend is helping to develop immunotherapy methods. While it's awful to think about the price, it's important to think about why the price is paid and how much suffering can be prevented. Another note: there are strict codes of ethics for how animals are treated in labs, so in most reputable organizations, the suffering is as minimal as possible (sometimes no suffering at all).

nojvek 8y ago
I really wish there was more oversight into Animals being used for testing. Dogs are probably the most humane treated animals on the planet. I wish other animals got the similar treatment as well. Would love to read some of those debates. Don’t get me wrong. I am in support for using mice for medical reasons.
- trombonechamp 8y ago
  In most countries, there is an ungodly large amount of oversight that goes into animals used in scientific research. The problem is that when the media reports animal testing, they skew the facts in order to make them sound dramatic, when in reality animal well-being is taken very seriously. Lab mice in general live much better lives than your pet mouse.
  - nojvek 8y ago
    I didn’t know about this. I think my impressions have mostly come from movies like “planet of apes” so yes, they have been skewed by media.
- dsajames 8y ago
  If you care about animal cruelty, the real problems are habitat loss leading the starvation and habitat loss, followed by overhunting/fishing, followed by industrial scale agribusiness where animals are kept in horrible conditions for life, followed by shitty slaughter practices of some small scale farmers, then shitty pet owners, and waaaay down at the bottom is researchers who sometimes treat the animals poorly.

jasonszhao 8y ago

The article mentions planaria, a type of flatworm that can regenerate from a small piece of tissue. Many experiments with these animals involve cutting them up various ways.[0] I agree that animal testing is integral to modern medicine, but I also agree with the parent that unnecessarily inflicting pain on even lower animals reflects badly on humanity. How many of these experiments are actually necessary? Do research institutions make the researcher convince them that the suffering is really necessary for medicine, rather than merely to satisfy some curiosity? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian#Regeneration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian#Regeneration As a side note, the next section of the Wikipedia article, describes even more grotesque experiments.