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This reeks of hypocrisy. The state actively subsidises factory farming which is at least 100 times more morally messed up than this but this could be shut down?

This reeks of hypocrisy. The state actively subsidises factory farming which is at least 100 times more morally messed up than this but this could be shut down? When one of the key uses cases will be to help the infirm and disabled? The number of animals being discussed here is less than 200 all up. Mostly pigs. Do you know how many pigs are grown for slaughter each year in the USA? 130 MILLION! 90000 are killed every day! I'm a meat eater but even for me those numbers make me feel slightly ill.

lathiat 4y ago
The number of chickens will blow your mind. There was a world clock I saw once counting like population and a bunch of random statistics including chickens in approximated real time.
- wyre 4y ago
  That’s https://animalclock.org/ https://animalclock.org/
- nostromo 4y ago
  Wait until you see the number of fish: https://considerveganism.com/counter/ https://considerveganism.com/counter/
  - ricardobeat 4y ago
    Those numbers for fish cannot be right. Thats basically 1 whole fish per day for each of 8 billion people on the planet.
    - akiselev 4y ago
      Smaller fishes reproduce faster and in greater numbers so most of deaths are probably fish like anchovies and minnows that go mostly to a variety of processed fish products and cat food
    - chroma 4y ago
      The numbers sound crazy because anchovies and sardines are tiny.
    - lovich 4y ago
      Have you seen what primarily seafood eating cultures consume? There’s a lot instances of a large fish like a tuna being shared amongst many, or even something like a salmon that can feed one. When my in laws would prepare a meal it would usually be 50+ smaller fish or crabs for 4 people
      - kamaal 4y ago
        In South India, The Indian oil Sardine fish is something people eat like 5+ fish/meal. People under estimate how much fish is sold and eaten. There are also other kinds of fish available in Bangalore they come like $1.5/kg. They are basically the 'Chinese Pomfret', they are mostly found in lakes formed around water bodies downstream to dam spillways. These are almost algae to protein conversion organism. Their only cost is cost of transportation. You need to see just how much people eat this. The fact they are also by many a definition way more cheaper than even vegetables.
    - someNameIG 4y ago
      Estimates put it around 2 trillion fish (or saline overall) killed each year.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      I once ordered a sampler plate at a Korean place and ate a bunch of what I thought were little noodles, but quickly realized were tiny fish. So I probably ate 20 or 30 fish that day and brought the average up a bit.
memish 4y ago
The state also spends tax payer money on things like this: According to documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by taxpayer watchdog group White Coat Waste Project, and subsequent media coverage, from October 2018 until February 2019, NIAID spent $1.68 million in taxpayer funds on drug tests involving 44 beagle puppies. The dogs were all between six and eight months old. The commissioned tests involved injecting and force-feeding the puppies an experimental drug for several weeks, before killing and dissecting them. https://mace.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-mace-leads-letter-dr-anthony-fauci-cruel-taxpayer-funded-experiments https://mace.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-mace-leads-l...
- c4ptnjack 4y ago
  How else would we test an experimental drug and what makes that bad or cruel? And the phrase "injecting and force-feeding the puppies an experimental drug for several weeks, before killing and dissecting them" is beyond sensationalizing. You could describe plenty of high school science experiments and Medical Doctor training the same way lol.
bscphil 4y ago
Partially agree, but I think a lot of the public outrage is over the use / killing / botched experiments on monkeys, which are widely acknowledged to be among the most intelligent and human-like of non human animals. Regardless of the degree to which it can be philosophically justified, intelligence and human-likeness (in terms of social abilities, emotional capacity, self-awareness, etc) are often seen as making mistreatment more ethically questionable than it would otherwise be. In terms of scale, factory farming is obviously far more messed up. But humans don't always react purely to the scale of suffering, we also react to its severity and what it reveals about the person who is causing the suffering. Unfortunately, a lot of people are not prepared to see animals who undergo factory farming as enduring "pointless" suffering, while a monkey killed as the result of a failed experiment does, etc.
- arjun_krishna1 4y ago
  Pigs are really smart.
  - peanuty1 4y ago
    Widely accepted to be smarter than dogs.
didericis 4y ago
The saddest reality of human nature that I don’t think I’ll ever come to terms with is the aggressive, unrelenting desire to hold the most competent and boundary pushing people to intentionally impossible standards. A million people could torture a thousand chickens each over the course of a lifetime and throw away the meat, overeat and make themselves a diabetic, and do all kinds of things that actively make the sacrifice of that chicken meaningless, and one scientist who tries to maximize the gain of that sacrifice and better humanity by studying it’s brain is hounded and harassed not because he’s worse than the average person, but because he’s better.
- bathtub365 4y ago
  They are doing the experiments on monkeys, not chickens.
  - 1over137 4y ago
    There's a term for that: speciesism.
    - kapildev 4y ago
      Humans have generally used consciousness, the level of intelligence and companionship to gauge how much of sympathy an organism gets from humanity. This is used to determine which abortion is okay, why it is not okay to kill and eat dogs while other animals are, and why humans are considered above other organisms. If we are to be consistent here, would not it follow that experiment on monkeys deserve more scrutiny over the experiments on monkeys who are demonstrably more closer to us while also having higher level of intelligence than pigs?
    - Georgelemental 4y ago
      Is it "speciesm" to care more for the suffering of humans than that of bacteria? If not, where do you draw the line and why?
      - someNameIG 4y ago
ElijahLynn 4y ago
Valid point. Hypocrisy is real. I say this as a vegan for 17 years.
gnarbarian 4y ago
this all comes down to Elon's perceived alignment with power in the us government. When you are aligned with the political power, you will sail through policy reviews, milestones and never see an audit or investigation. when you are not, you will face never ending snaggles and red tape, threats of jail time, OIG investigations, endless proposal rejections and an unwavering ability for procedural outcomes to break in ways more painful to your goals. I've experienced it from both sides and when the tide turns it is a very ugly and sobering realization of endemic dysfunction in our government. All because people believe the big boss will reward the bureaucrats who torment their perceived ideological adversaries. /cynical rant from someone going through it.
- beeboop 4y ago
  I think it's less about government alignment and more about vested interest alignment. There are a lot of people who want Elon to fail in everything he does and a lot of them have a lot of power and influence to help make it happen.
  - gnarbarian 4y ago
    you're right there, both aspects certainly play a role. similar attacks we're launched by conservatives on fauci because he was a high profile target perceived to be on the opposite side: https://bfp.org/fauci-hammered-by-beagle-freedom-project-threatened-with-lawsuit-over-gruesome-dog-experiments/ https://bfp.org/fauci-hammered-by-beagle-freedom-project-thr... >One particularly horrific experiment Fauci’s NIAID apparently paid for involved locking beagle puppies’ heads in boxes with sand flies, which were given hour-long intervals to feast on the poor dogs’ faces. Weary of the suffering dogs’ helpless cries, the experimenters arranged to have them “de-barked” – a barbaric procedure known as a cordectomy. judge for yourself whether this is better or worse than neuralink but it was allowed to proceed until there was a political reason to start digging for dirt.
    - c4ptnjack 4y ago
      This article is a repost from RT, as mentioned in the tiny italic footer. Even with that in mind, the authors themselves state these are "alleged" accusations lacking any sources or evidence. They mostly just claim over and over Fauci himself "bankrolled" these experiments and was the mastermind behind this supposed9 torture. That's specifically NOT the way bureaucratic agencies, including the NIH, work at all. I don't support animal cruelty whatsoever. And animal well being genuinely matters to me at all times. However.. vaccines, medical techniques, and pharmaceuticals that have transformed human existence in the last century and a half by saving billions of lives have often required animal testing during development. In the end, the only other option is doing the same things on humans. The perfect example is the history of snake venom treatments. Rabbits were used to test the hypothesis of building an immune response via low dose titration of the poison overtime. Then you can take the plasma from their blood and harvest the antibodies to use as an antidote to a specific poison. Fast Forward, we currently use horses to create the antibodies by dosing them with low levels of whatever venom youre trying to treat over the course of a year. Then, harvest their blood plasma and you have yourself antivenom. Sounds terrible right? I'd disagree if one of my loved ones had just been bitten by an incredibly poisonous, rare snake requiring these seemingly cruel medicines to save their life in the matter of an hour. Plus the process is actually painless and harmless to the horses thanks to modern science.
iancmceachern 4y ago
But those animals are not unnecessarily cruely treated. It's one thing to farm animals, it's another to deliberately treat them more poorly than is strictly needed to get the value out of them. That's what neuralink is accused of - unnecessary cruelty.
- TapWaterBandit 4y ago
  I defy you to watch any videos of factory farming and tell me that is anything but cruelty.
  - iancmceachern 4y ago
    Agreed, but this has nothing to do with the article
  - 7373737373 4y ago
    I recommend Dominion (2018): https://youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko https://youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko
- yonaguska 4y ago
  I'm waiting on the federal probe into Fauci's beagles. Talk about cruelty. Not a fan of nuerolink and Elon, but it seems political.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
someonewhocar3s 4y ago
Someone 4y ago
> The state actively subsidises factory farming which is at least 100 times more morally messed up than this but this could be shut down? Yes, it could, and rightly so. Note that I’m not saying it should. I don’t know the details, and certainly can’t judge whether the (potential) benefits of this research warrant the suffering to animals. What you should be angry about is not the existence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Welfare_Act_of_1966 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Welfare_Act_of_1966, but the, as far as I can tell, nonexistence of federal laws regulating the treatment of farm animals (they are excluded from that law, and https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/farm-animal-protection-faq#laws https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/farm-animal-protecti... says there aren’t similar federal laws regulating their welfare. The list of state laws at https://www.humanesociety.org/sites/default/files/docs/HSUS_state-farm-animal-protection-laws.pdf https://www.humanesociety.org/sites/default/files/docs/HSUS_... also is very short) Also note that animal welfare laws typically aren’t about the killing of animals, but about their suffering. Society at large isn’t ready for forbidding the killing of animals for food or for medical research.
LightG 4y ago
Hypocrisy doesn't absolve those acting in very questionable ways at Neuralink. Film recommendation: Okja
ccn0p 4y ago
these are just puff hit pieces at this point.
djexjms 4y ago
I think the point here is that the people performing the actual experiments think that the amount of animal testing is inappropriate. If you do an experiment and it ends up killing the animal, that is one result. One data point. If you do the experiment 100 times and it kills 100 animals, that may be a signal that you need to work out some theory and not a signal that you need to go ahead and kill another 100 animals. If this were just PETA or something, it would be pretty easy to ignore, but when the employees performing the experiments are complaining, I think it's pretty reasonable to pay attention. These are people that signed up to work for the company. They knew that animal testing would be involved. Many of them had probably already worked on experiments that utilized animal test subjects. And these are the people saying that the level of animal testing is not appropriate.
krainboltgreene 4y ago
> When one of the key uses cases will be to help the infirm and disabled? If it ever works.

lathiat 4y ago

The number of chickens will blow your mind. There was a world clock I saw once counting like population and a bunch of random statistics including chickens in approximated real time.

wyre 4y ago
That’s https://animalclock.org/ https://animalclock.org/
nostromo 4y ago
Wait until you see the number of fish: https://considerveganism.com/counter/ https://considerveganism.com/counter/
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  Those numbers for fish cannot be right. Thats basically 1 whole fish per day for each of 8 billion people on the planet.
  - akiselev 4y ago
    Smaller fishes reproduce faster and in greater numbers so most of deaths are probably fish like anchovies and minnows that go mostly to a variety of processed fish products and cat food
  - chroma 4y ago
    The numbers sound crazy because anchovies and sardines are tiny.
  - lovich 4y ago
    Have you seen what primarily seafood eating cultures consume? There’s a lot instances of a large fish like a tuna being shared amongst many, or even something like a salmon that can feed one. When my in laws would prepare a meal it would usually be 50+ smaller fish or crabs for 4 people
    - kamaal 4y ago
      In South India, The Indian oil Sardine fish is something people eat like 5+ fish/meal. People under estimate how much fish is sold and eaten. There are also other kinds of fish available in Bangalore they come like $1.5/kg. They are basically the 'Chinese Pomfret', they are mostly found in lakes formed around water bodies downstream to dam spillways. These are almost algae to protein conversion organism. Their only cost is cost of transportation. You need to see just how much people eat this. The fact they are also by many a definition way more cheaper than even vegetables.
  - someNameIG 4y ago
    Estimates put it around 2 trillion fish (or saline overall) killed each year.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I once ordered a sampler plate at a Korean place and ate a bunch of what I thought were little noodles, but quickly realized were tiny fish. So I probably ate 20 or 30 fish that day and brought the average up a bit.

memish 4y ago

The state also spends tax payer money on things like this: According to documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by taxpayer watchdog group White Coat Waste Project, and subsequent media coverage, from October 2018 until February 2019, NIAID spent $1.68 million in taxpayer funds on drug tests involving 44 beagle puppies. The dogs were all between six and eight months old. The commissioned tests involved injecting and force-feeding the puppies an experimental drug for several weeks, before killing and dissecting them. https://mace.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-mace-leads-letter-dr-anthony-fauci-cruel-taxpayer-funded-experiments https://mace.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-mace-leads-l...

c4ptnjack 4y ago
How else would we test an experimental drug and what makes that bad or cruel? And the phrase "injecting and force-feeding the puppies an experimental drug for several weeks, before killing and dissecting them" is beyond sensationalizing. You could describe plenty of high school science experiments and Medical Doctor training the same way lol.

bscphil 4y ago

Partially agree, but I think a lot of the public outrage is over the use / killing / botched experiments on monkeys, which are widely acknowledged to be among the most intelligent and human-like of non human animals. Regardless of the degree to which it can be philosophically justified, intelligence and human-likeness (in terms of social abilities, emotional capacity, self-awareness, etc) are often seen as making mistreatment more ethically questionable than it would otherwise be. In terms of scale, factory farming is obviously far more messed up. But humans don't always react purely to the scale of suffering, we also react to its severity and what it reveals about the person who is causing the suffering. Unfortunately, a lot of people are not prepared to see animals who undergo factory farming as enduring "pointless" suffering, while a monkey killed as the result of a failed experiment does, etc.

arjun_krishna1 4y ago
Pigs are really smart.
- peanuty1 4y ago
  Widely accepted to be smarter than dogs.

didericis 4y ago

The saddest reality of human nature that I don’t think I’ll ever come to terms with is the aggressive, unrelenting desire to hold the most competent and boundary pushing people to intentionally impossible standards. A million people could torture a thousand chickens each over the course of a lifetime and throw away the meat, overeat and make themselves a diabetic, and do all kinds of things that actively make the sacrifice of that chicken meaningless, and one scientist who tries to maximize the gain of that sacrifice and better humanity by studying it’s brain is hounded and harassed not because he’s worse than the average person, but because he’s better.

bathtub365 4y ago
They are doing the experiments on monkeys, not chickens.
- 1over137 4y ago
  There's a term for that: speciesism.
  - kapildev 4y ago
    Humans have generally used consciousness, the level of intelligence and companionship to gauge how much of sympathy an organism gets from humanity. This is used to determine which abortion is okay, why it is not okay to kill and eat dogs while other animals are, and why humans are considered above other organisms. If we are to be consistent here, would not it follow that experiment on monkeys deserve more scrutiny over the experiments on monkeys who are demonstrably more closer to us while also having higher level of intelligence than pigs?
  - Georgelemental 4y ago
    Is it "speciesm" to care more for the suffering of humans than that of bacteria? If not, where do you draw the line and why?
    - someNameIG 4y ago

ElijahLynn 4y ago

Valid point. Hypocrisy is real. I say this as a vegan for 17 years.

gnarbarian 4y ago

this all comes down to Elon's perceived alignment with power in the us government. When you are aligned with the political power, you will sail through policy reviews, milestones and never see an audit or investigation. when you are not, you will face never ending snaggles and red tape, threats of jail time, OIG investigations, endless proposal rejections and an unwavering ability for procedural outcomes to break in ways more painful to your goals. I've experienced it from both sides and when the tide turns it is a very ugly and sobering realization of endemic dysfunction in our government. All because people believe the big boss will reward the bureaucrats who torment their perceived ideological adversaries. /cynical rant from someone going through it.

beeboop 4y ago
I think it's less about government alignment and more about vested interest alignment. There are a lot of people who want Elon to fail in everything he does and a lot of them have a lot of power and influence to help make it happen.
- gnarbarian 4y ago
  you're right there, both aspects certainly play a role. similar attacks we're launched by conservatives on fauci because he was a high profile target perceived to be on the opposite side: https://bfp.org/fauci-hammered-by-beagle-freedom-project-threatened-with-lawsuit-over-gruesome-dog-experiments/ https://bfp.org/fauci-hammered-by-beagle-freedom-project-thr... >One particularly horrific experiment Fauci’s NIAID apparently paid for involved locking beagle puppies’ heads in boxes with sand flies, which were given hour-long intervals to feast on the poor dogs’ faces. Weary of the suffering dogs’ helpless cries, the experimenters arranged to have them “de-barked” – a barbaric procedure known as a cordectomy. judge for yourself whether this is better or worse than neuralink but it was allowed to proceed until there was a political reason to start digging for dirt.
  - c4ptnjack 4y ago
    This article is a repost from RT, as mentioned in the tiny italic footer. Even with that in mind, the authors themselves state these are "alleged" accusations lacking any sources or evidence. They mostly just claim over and over Fauci himself "bankrolled" these experiments and was the mastermind behind this supposed9 torture. That's specifically NOT the way bureaucratic agencies, including the NIH, work at all. I don't support animal cruelty whatsoever. And animal well being genuinely matters to me at all times. However.. vaccines, medical techniques, and pharmaceuticals that have transformed human existence in the last century and a half by saving billions of lives have often required animal testing during development. In the end, the only other option is doing the same things on humans. The perfect example is the history of snake venom treatments. Rabbits were used to test the hypothesis of building an immune response via low dose titration of the poison overtime. Then you can take the plasma from their blood and harvest the antibodies to use as an antidote to a specific poison. Fast Forward, we currently use horses to create the antibodies by dosing them with low levels of whatever venom youre trying to treat over the course of a year. Then, harvest their blood plasma and you have yourself antivenom. Sounds terrible right? I'd disagree if one of my loved ones had just been bitten by an incredibly poisonous, rare snake requiring these seemingly cruel medicines to save their life in the matter of an hour. Plus the process is actually painless and harmless to the horses thanks to modern science.

iancmceachern 4y ago

But those animals are not unnecessarily cruely treated. It's one thing to farm animals, it's another to deliberately treat them more poorly than is strictly needed to get the value out of them. That's what neuralink is accused of - unnecessary cruelty.

TapWaterBandit 4y ago
I defy you to watch any videos of factory farming and tell me that is anything but cruelty.
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  Agreed, but this has nothing to do with the article
- 7373737373 4y ago
  I recommend Dominion (2018): https://youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko https://youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko
yonaguska 4y ago
I'm waiting on the federal probe into Fauci's beagles. Talk about cruelty. Not a fan of nuerolink and Elon, but it seems political.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

someonewhocar3s 4y ago

Someone 4y ago

> The state actively subsidises factory farming which is at least 100 times more morally messed up than this but this could be shut down? Yes, it could, and rightly so. Note that I’m not saying it should. I don’t know the details, and certainly can’t judge whether the (potential) benefits of this research warrant the suffering to animals. What you should be angry about is not the existence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Welfare_Act_of_1966 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Welfare_Act_of_1966, but the, as far as I can tell, nonexistence of federal laws regulating the treatment of farm animals (they are excluded from that law, and https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/farm-animal-protection-faq#laws https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/farm-animal-protecti... says there aren’t similar federal laws regulating their welfare. The list of state laws at https://www.humanesociety.org/sites/default/files/docs/HSUS_state-farm-animal-protection-laws.pdf https://www.humanesociety.org/sites/default/files/docs/HSUS_... also is very short) Also note that animal welfare laws typically aren’t about the killing of animals, but about their suffering. Society at large isn’t ready for forbidding the killing of animals for food or for medical research.

LightG 4y ago

Hypocrisy doesn't absolve those acting in very questionable ways at Neuralink. Film recommendation: Okja

ccn0p 4y ago

these are just puff hit pieces at this point.

djexjms 4y ago

I think the point here is that the people performing the actual experiments think that the amount of animal testing is inappropriate. If you do an experiment and it ends up killing the animal, that is one result. One data point. If you do the experiment 100 times and it kills 100 animals, that may be a signal that you need to work out some theory and not a signal that you need to go ahead and kill another 100 animals. If this were just PETA or something, it would be pretty easy to ignore, but when the employees performing the experiments are complaining, I think it's pretty reasonable to pay attention. These are people that signed up to work for the company. They knew that animal testing would be involved. Many of them had probably already worked on experiments that utilized animal test subjects. And these are the people saying that the level of animal testing is not appropriate.

krainboltgreene 4y ago

> When one of the key uses cases will be to help the infirm and disabled? If it ever works.