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Have you ever worked with lab mice? It leaves you with this exact juxtaposition of seeing the fantastic progress being made with mouse models and seeing the ve

by Nbox9 6y ago

Have you ever worked with lab mice? It leaves you with this exact juxtaposition of seeing the fantastic progress being made with mouse models and seeing the very real suffering on such a large scale. The fact that many experiments are okay on non-human animals but not humans is speciesist. Still, it’s the line we are all most comfortable with. I’d rather not have people be experimented on. I’d rather continue to have the advances in science built on the lives of untold number of lab animals. However, the line is arbitrary.

yboris 6y ago
Thank you for sharing! Peter Singer, one of the most famous philosophers (and perhaps "the grandfather" of animal rights / animal welfare movement) argues that perhaps, unless we were willing to perform an experiment on humans, we ought not perform the experiment on animals. There are so many experiments which treat animals in awful ways for virtually no progress towards the goal of improving human lives. We were far worse in the past (see Draize test) and have gotten better at not performing really horrible experiments on animals. But it's precisely because animal lives are seen as less important that we are willing to perform experiments with almost no benefit for humanity. At the moment, the largest tragedy is meat consumption - we can focus on improving lab animals' lives too, but the meat consumption is orders of magnitude worse with respect to causing suffering to sentient creatures.
- R0b0t1 6y ago
  Not doing these tests would hold back progress even more. Do you have good examples of pointless experiments? Not bearing out "useful" results is hard to evaluate because rejecting a hypothesis can be important as well. To me, it seems science is moving away from appropriate testing due to funding issues, etc. I don't think making it worse by making illegal certain tests would make it any better.
- yboris 6y ago
  Re: R0b0t1 Peter Singer documents in his book Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement how (the taxpayer funded) American Museum of Natural History was mutilating cat faces to see if it affected their sexual behavior. It is very hard to make an argument how experiments like these would be a noticeably beneficial to anything other than the tautological "we now know more". From 1976: https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=hensart https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewconte...
- Nbox9 6y ago
  > At the moment, the largest tragedy is meat consumption I fully agree, but when discussing the terrible ways we treat animals I often find that people are less willing to listen and think about the suffering of animals when it’s something they themselves are taking active part in. My goal when writing about animal suffering is to help people acknowledge animal suffering is a bad thing, and to think about under which circumstances we create animal suffering. If they start thinking that way it can eventually lead to changes in diet.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  > We were far worse in the past To be fair, we were far worse to humans, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiments > we can focus on improving lab animals' lives too, but the meat consumption is orders of magnitude worse with respect to causing suffering to sentient creatures. Just like there were orders of magnitude more harm done in just the normal workings of US imperialism on Guatemala than from those horrific experiments. We only notice the interesting suffering, while the mundane day-to-day operations of institutionalized suffering are brushed off as a necessary evil. It's the boring cruelty that lays the groundwork for the creative cruelty.

by Nbox9 6y ago

yboris 6y ago

Thank you for sharing! Peter Singer, one of the most famous philosophers (and perhaps "the grandfather" of animal rights / animal welfare movement) argues that perhaps, unless we were willing to perform an experiment on humans, we ought not perform the experiment on animals. There are so many experiments which treat animals in awful ways for virtually no progress towards the goal of improving human lives. We were far worse in the past (see Draize test) and have gotten better at not performing really horrible experiments on animals. But it's precisely because animal lives are seen as less important that we are willing to perform experiments with almost no benefit for humanity. At the moment, the largest tragedy is meat consumption - we can focus on improving lab animals' lives too, but the meat consumption is orders of magnitude worse with respect to causing suffering to sentient creatures.

R0b0t1 6y ago
Not doing these tests would hold back progress even more. Do you have good examples of pointless experiments? Not bearing out "useful" results is hard to evaluate because rejecting a hypothesis can be important as well. To me, it seems science is moving away from appropriate testing due to funding issues, etc. I don't think making it worse by making illegal certain tests would make it any better.
yboris 6y ago
Re: R0b0t1 Peter Singer documents in his book Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement how (the taxpayer funded) American Museum of Natural History was mutilating cat faces to see if it affected their sexual behavior. It is very hard to make an argument how experiments like these would be a noticeably beneficial to anything other than the tautological "we now know more". From 1976: https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=hensart https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewconte...
Nbox9 6y ago
> At the moment, the largest tragedy is meat consumption I fully agree, but when discussing the terrible ways we treat animals I often find that people are less willing to listen and think about the suffering of animals when it’s something they themselves are taking active part in. My goal when writing about animal suffering is to help people acknowledge animal suffering is a bad thing, and to think about under which circumstances we create animal suffering. If they start thinking that way it can eventually lead to changes in diet.
pessimizer 6y ago
> We were far worse in the past To be fair, we were far worse to humans, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiments > we can focus on improving lab animals' lives too, but the meat consumption is orders of magnitude worse with respect to causing suffering to sentient creatures. Just like there were orders of magnitude more harm done in just the normal workings of US imperialism on Guatemala than from those horrific experiments. We only notice the interesting suffering, while the mundane day-to-day operations of institutionalized suffering are brushed off as a necessary evil. It's the boring cruelty that lays the groundwork for the creative cruelty.