One of the features of arguments for “ethical” treatment of animals is that they are often so unethical. For example, it is often argued that animal research is

One of the features of arguments for “ethical” treatment of animals is that they are often so unethical. For example, it is often argued that animal research is unnecessary because computer models are sufficient. Of this misleading article that conflates animal research with animal testing. It turns out that living this are complicated, and how they react to chemicals is largely impossible to predict. And humans still die of disease, and are interested in curing those diseases. And, we really don’t think that experimenting on humans first to answer basic biological questions, when almost identical processes occur in rodents, is reasonable. So we learn things first in animals. It’s fine to say that many drugs fail to meet expectations when tested in humans, but pretty much everything a physician learns about metabolism in a biochemistry course was worked out in rats or mice, and most of those things were never validated in human tissues because the human tissue is not, and should not be, available. And patients are better served by doctors familiar with biochemistry. One might argue that since we know so much, we have learned enough and further research in animals is unnecessary (or can be modeled). But while we now know most of the components of the body (at least those encoded by the genome), we are spectacularly ignorant of what those parts do, how they interact, and how those interactions respond to environmental changes (such as disease and drugs). And we can only explore those questions in animals.