> But it should be. Saying "it doesn't matter because they'd be dead anyway" opens all sorts of slippery slopes if you apply it to other animals (eg. humans).

> But it should be. Saying "it doesn't matter because they'd be dead anyway" opens all sorts of slippery slopes if you apply it to other animals (eg. humans). You'll get no argument from me on the morals and implications, I completely agree. But I'm less making a moral statement about how research should be conducted and more just acknowledging the fact that a lot of people don't care about whether or not rats are tortured in the first place. Not that they're going out of their way to induce suffering (with the exception of experiments like the rat utopia which was basically Cave Johnson levels of arbitrary cruelty for no reason masked under the guise of science) -- but if the choice is between torturing a rat for a month or building much more complicated housing on a space station, a lot of people will shrug their shoulders and say "stinks for them, but they're rats, who cares." The darkly humorous thing about this article is that the page is describing these containers almost with a sense of pride about how advanced and humane they are. I think we like to have this mental model of animal research where animals are well cared for and they do have this final sacrifice at the end, but we're doing the best we can otherwise. And I want research to be as humane as possible, but I'm not naive about the reality of how animals are often treated during research and how low the standards we have on animal welfare actually are -- humane research is a goal and ideal more than it is a reality. I'm not going to get into the ethics of it, I'm just saying that keeping rats in a container this size for a month is with no exaggeration psychological torture for the animals involved; anyone who has any experience with rat behavior will tell you that a rat will be absolutely miserable in that environment. The euthanasia at the end is the kindest part of the experiment. And people can take away whatever conclusions they want from that. I'm not telling anyone they have to care whether the experiments are humane, and I don't want to ignore that there are plenty of people who don't really care about rats. I'm not telling anyone what their response should be, I just don't want people lying to themselves and pretending that the experiments are in any way humane if they're not.