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That sounds like an overblown concern to me. Most people won't bother to even sign an online petition for something like this. In the 1960s, the US considered

That sounds like an overblown concern to me. Most people won't bother to even sign an online petition for something like this. In the 1960s, the US considered passing a federal law against dognapping. It got more mail than anything having to do with the Vietnam war, for which there was broad and growing opposition at the time[0]. And, again, the thing every single person in this thread is conveniently leaving out: I'm not saying petitions or public support should be a huge factor or a determining factor by themselves. These two things together would likely not make it worthwhile to start a PR campaign. As far as focusing on more popular areas, where's the evidence that there's necessarily anything wrong with that? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dognapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dognapping

boomboomsubban 3y ago
>As far as focusing on more popular areas, where's the evidence that there's necessarily anything wrong with that Imagine researchers want to do some new research into some kind of surgery in hopes of it eventually being useful for humans. They're deciding what animal to perform the research with and the two options are geckos or dogs. Everything they know suggests using geckos would provide more beneficial data for this experiment, but with dogs they know they could run a PR campaign about how they're helping injured dogs and use a regular stream of photos to maintain public support. This is a BS hypothetical, but it's fairly easy to imagine many teams picking the option that does worse research but provides more funding. edit and this is assuming everybody requesting research grants is well intentioned.