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I Was an Animal Experimenter

71 points by romefort 11y ago

SunShiranui 11y ago
It is paywalled.
- danieldk 11y ago
  With any such article: Google it, and you can read it without paying.
nosefrog 11y ago
100 years from now, we will look back on the experiments performed on nonhuman animals with the same disgust that we have for the experiments performed on humans by the Nazis. "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." - Martin Luther King Jr.
- BringTheTanks 11y ago
  You have a somewhat naive view about how our moral compass moves as a straight lines from bad to good. Before the Nazis performed experiments on humans, it was considered horrible to perform experiments on humans. What Nazis had that allowed them to perform experiments on humans was a carte blanche to do whatever they want by contemporary law, and the ideology that those human beings were in fact "inferior" human beings. I don't know if you eat fish, chicken and so on, but probably you don't think of yourself as a Nazi if you would. Because you don't consider a chicken at the same level as a human. And this gives you carte blanche to have chicken for dinner and feel absolutely no remorse. Is it right or wrong? I don't pass judgment. I know all beings have a sense of self and we shouldn't cause pain and take a life for no reason, yet, killing each other and eating each other is part of the cycle of life. I know that if we consider life sacrosanct and we eat chicken fingers at Chipotle, we need ideology to justify our actions, and so we'll consider animals inferior. If we consider them inferior, they'll be target for experiments, because medical science will continue to evolve. Depending on how our culture evolves, the moral compass may move in an entirely different direction, where we stop regarding life of any kind as so precious, even human. We'll acknowledge how replaceable we are, and our mortality. This would enable full legalization of humane practices like assisted death for the heavily disabled and terminally ill, and might open the doors again for experimenting on humans to move medicine forward. You never know.
  - randomsearch 11y ago
    "yet, killing each other and eating each other is part of the cycle of life" I'm not sure what "the cycle of life" is, but just because something may be present elsewhere in the animal kingdom does not mean we should replicate it or justify our actions through it.
    - rimantas 11y ago
      It does not mean we shouldn't too.
    - afarrell 11y ago
      But does it mean we should be willing to lock someone else in a cage or ruin their livelihood for doing so?
  - nosefrog 11y ago
    In recent history, we have recognized the moral significance of groups that have less power. This has happened (and is currently happening) for black people (and people of color in general), children, women, LGBTQ people, animals that are "like us" (such as elephants and chimpanzees), animals that are our companions (like dogs and cats), and other groups that have been and are currently discriminated against. The pattern that I see is that society is giving moral value to groups that have less power; groups that we have historically harmed without thought. We must define "group" though, because obviously the most powerless things on this planet are plants and inanimate, nonliving objects. And it would be very short-sighted to define "group" as "everything that society currently gives moral value, i.e. all humans and an arbitrary subset of animals". I define "group" as persons that can feel emotion (not necessarily human emotion), have some sense of their environments, and have some sense of desire. In short, our "group" includes all sentient beings. If we follow this line of thought, it feels obvious that all sentient beings will be recognized as valuable. And that the question is not "if", but "when". I want to address your counter example: > This would enable full legalization of humane practices like assisted death for the heavily disabled and terminally ill, and might open the doors again for experimenting on humans to move medicine forward. As a society, we believe that a moral being does not have the right to take their own life. It doesn't say anything about who is or isn't a moral being, which is what I am addressing. The counter example you were looking for was a society where all humans had no moral value. If humans have no moral value, then it does not matter if a human kills themselves, because it also doesn't matter if humans kill and harm each other. Disclaimer: I have lived my entire life in the United States. When I say "society", I usually mean "the west".
- Natura 11y ago
  Why should we? Right now we need to do this kind of experiments to relieve massive pain from humans. Some tests(not all of them) can't be done without live animals. Why should animal suffer for human? Well human have higher moral value because of higher ability of pain, emotions and cognition. Don't get me wrong given the choice I would stop any animal cruelty if there would be alternative. As far as I know there isn't one. We can't just simply switch to some computer simulation for testing drugs instead of testing them on live animals unfortunately. So stopping animal testing entirely doesn't seem to me to be right, but we should take a closer look at it. Be extremely careful that any harm done to animals is justified, that research being done on them really brings benefits and that we are doing best we can to relieve as much pain as it is possible. I believe that much bigger issue eating meat, where reason why we cause huge amount of pain to animals comes mostly to , because it taste good.
  - nosefrog 11y ago
    I do not have an answer to the question of whether experimenting on nonhuman animals can be justified out of necessity. I have some thoughts, though: Assume that in the near future, we give nonhuman animals the same moral value as humans. And then say we wanted to conduct an experiment on an animal to cure a human ailment. Before we harm a nonhuman animal, we need to ask whether we have the right to harm that animal. Because nonhuman animals and humans have the same moral value, this is equivalent to asking whether we would have the right to harm a human in the same position. So right off the bat, our standard for conducting tests on animals is, "would we have the right to conduct this test on a human?" Let's also assume that we believe humans must give consent before we have the right to conduct scientific experiments on them. If we apply this to animals, then we need to determine how to get consent from an animal, which seems hairy. And then there's the question of fairness -- if we've already determined that we have the right to perform this test on a human, and we're trying to cure a human ailment, then isn't it selfish to perform the experiment on a nonhuman animal? But, you may say, what if the gains outweight the cost? If we truly believe that we will gain enough to justify violating the rights of a nonhuman animal, that's consistent with justly violating the rights of a human. And then the question of selfishness comes up again. > I believe that much bigger issue eating meat, where reason why we cause huge amount of pain to animals comes mostly to , because it taste good. I believe they are both big issues. My only advice is to be careful not to fall into the trap of classifying one as a less evil (even though it seems that harming animals for our enjoyment is much worse than harming them out of necessity). If we fight to recognize the moral value of nonhuman animals on all fronts, then the world you wish for (only performing experiments out of extreme necessity) will come too. (This is not a personal jab at you -- it's something I noticed in my own thinking, too.)
- rimantas 11y ago
  I hope that 100 years from now we will still look at those who could benefit humanity by doing experiments on animals but did not do so for "moral" reasons with disgust.
  - thomasahle 11y ago
    With disgust even? What about all those that don't work in a job benefitting humanity, and do so for more selfish reasons than moral?
  - nosefrog 11y ago
    > ...we will still look at those who could benefit humanity by doing experiments on animals but did not do so for "moral" reasons with disgust. Do we do that today? If a researcher refuses to harm an animal to further science, do we think less of them?
- MrDosu 11y ago
  I am reading this while eating a steak. Js.
nailer 11y ago
> That powerful talk made me realize that animals, like us, are sentient beings who have intelligence and experience fear and pain. Well yes, we're animals. I don't understand why adults still think of humans as somehow being not animals.
- Netcob 11y ago
  Especially the most basic and primitive emotions/sensations that influence our behavior very directly, like pain or panic. I get how fish might not experience "culture shock", "weltschmerz" or "ennui", but most of the things we feel every day aren't special at all.
  - pvaldes 11y ago
    I cant see a fish bored perfectly, or experiencing culture shock. Why not?. A lot of people fall in this trap with fishes. "Well, goldfishes are dumb, and goldfishes are fishes, therefore fishes are dumb". To reduce the more diverse type of vertebrates, with more than 30.000 extant species, to the behaviour of a goldfish put in a matchbox of water is extreme oversimplification. Some fishes are very intelligent in fact. Not like an human but much more than a mice or a chicken for sure. Sadly the 90% of philosophers in history just didn't understand what type of creature is a fish and the derived reasoning about those had lead to funny dead ends. But the real problem is that "to be able to feel pain or not" or "to live in water or not" are just subjective lines (Saving lion, moral act. Saving tuna, maybe tomorrow, tunas are dumb). We could also create different laws for vegan species (cow: moral, dog: amoral), or for species that can feel love and care for his descendants (butterfly: amoral, spider: a wonderfully moral creature), or that can feel electromagnetic fields, or that have four extremities with 5 fingers at the end (human good, spider and horses amoral) or that can live longer and pacific lives (humans so-so, sequoia great). The rules of this game are totally artificial from the start.
- MrDosu 11y ago
  In a word: Lack of education
jobvandervoort 11y ago
I used to do animal experiments and my partner still does them daily. We both had to kill (or as they say in science -sacrifice) the animals ourselves when necessary. There is a very large body of research that couldn't and can't be done without animal experiments. Both in fundamental and clinical sciences. However, what I do see is a movement away from usage of macaques towards a higher usage of experiments using flies. Rodents are fundamental in neuroscience and will stay that for a while, as they are both easy to genetically modify and have reasonably sized brain and organs that is comparable to ours. I've seen several people, PhD students, but also top-level scientists, moving away from using animals or mammals for their experiments because of the same realization that the author had. It's important that we realize what we are doing to the animals, but the end of animal experimentation is not yet in sight.
Lorento 11y ago
Animals suffer horrible lives naturally too, and on a much more massive scale. If you're really against animal suffering and dying then a far bigger problem is the existence of wild animals with peak populations, unreliable food supplies, predators, fights and disease. Stopping animal research is like trying to stop global warming by driving slower. Feels like you're making a difference but you're not .
- janxgeist 11y ago
  I think this is a weak argument, because you could just as well use it to argue for conducting these experiments on humans: Humans suffer horrible lives naturally too, and on a much more massive scale. If you're really against human suffering and dying then a far bigger problem is the existence of humans with peak populations, unreliable food supplies, murderers, fights and disease. Stopping research on humans is like trying to stop global warming by driving slower. Feels like you're making a difference but you're not.
  - XorNot 11y ago
    This is not the slamdunk you think it is. If you could ensure the human population lived to exactly 70 years old and didn't suffer during that time, there is a very fair argument it would be a moral imperative to implement this social order since it would be a massive improvement over the current state of world affairs. Scale down that number to find where you think the line is.
    - janxgeist 11y ago
      I'm not sure I understand you correctly: are you saying that animal experiments would be ethical if they removed all suffering for humans?
  - afarrell 11y ago
    Yes, we devote X resources from stopping the suffering of humans at the expense of other humans. We currently only spend Y on stopping the suffering of humans from other causes and Y is not massively greater than X. However, the reasons for that are mostly due to the fact that spending on X also works to preserve the power structures (various government) that we use to direct money toward Y.
jonchang 11y ago
I can say with confidence that this sort of thing would never occur in a modern research laboratory. Note that standards for ethical experimentation on animals (including humans) hadn't really appeared until the 70s and 80s. A couple of points here: Any type of animal experimentation must be accompanied by an IACUC protocol that is approved by a committee, typically at least 3 people, and usually including a veterinarian, research scientists, and layperson. The protocol justifies why using animals is necessary for the research and exactly how the animals will be cared for during the experiments. Performing surgery on live animals - You have to be trained in the procedure by practicing on dead animals first. Any surgery that happens must be done under anesthesia using approved chemicals. For example, in fishes and amphibians, this is an anesthetic dose of MS-222. Sacrificing animals - Typical standards require that the experimenter sacrifice the animal quickly & humanely, using at least 2 methods (chemical and physical) to ensure that the animal is not suffering due to a sublethal dose of your chemical. Again for fishes, this is a lethal dose of MS-222 followed by either pithing or freezing. For rodents this is usually anesthesia followed by cervical dislocation. Experimental endpoints - You will not get your IACUC approved if you don't have a way of dealing with your live animals after your experiment is over. Simply killing them because you don't have money to keep them around is absolutely forbidden. For fishes, they get released back into the ocean or kept around for aquarium outreach purposes. The issue of animal rights is an important one. For example I personally think that the IACUC protocols don't go far enough. Nonvertebrate animals are typically not covered by IACUC at all so this means that it is legally above the board to vivisect slugs without anesthesia. Of course you might not think that slugs deserve rights but this is a debate that needs to happen. In particular many countries do not cover cephalopods (octopuses, squids, etc) under their animal use laws..
- Red_Tarsius 11y ago
  Thank you for spelling it out. As much as I empathize with the author, these articles are often misused by ignorant activists. In my country, years of research have been ruined thanks to the clueless. http://www.nature.com/news/animal-rights-activists-wreak-havoc-in-milan-laboratory-1.12847?wafflebotCursorId=1366791238000000:0:0 http://www.nature.com/news/animal-rights-activists-wreak-hav...
Luc 11y ago
Reading 'Animals Like Us' by Mark Rowlands made me realize that it is utterly reasonable to abstain from harming animals. There is a string of logic, starting from very basic principles of ethics, that makes it the rational thing to do (if you accept the basic principles). It's a sort of ethical math. Most people don't do the math because it's not obvious that some thought is needed, instead going with their gut feeling. http://www.amazon.com/dp/1859843867/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/1859843867/
- MrDosu 11y ago
  You are not going to get a vaccination against HIV for example without animal experimentation at the current state of science. My parents work in the field and I have worked at a few labs where they do animal experimentation. It's not as bad as the press makes it out to be. People don't work around animals their entire lives without caring about them.
  - Luc 11y ago
    Rowlands does a good job of dealing with these two arguments in his book. Like I said, I think it takes careful thinking, and a book is a good conduit for that.
- philwelch 11y ago
  Sorry, but starting from reasonable-sounding principles of ethics and following their logical consequences is how I became an anarcho-capitalist in my early 20's. Ethics can't be reduced to math.
  - Luc 11y ago
    I don't think caring for the well being of animals is that far out of the mainstream of ethical thinking. Besides, it's my own take on the book, and perhaps Mark Rowlands wouldn't even recognise it from my description. Perhaps I didn't do it justice.
    - philwelch 11y ago
howling 11y ago
I always wonder why people feel so upset over millions of animals being experimented every year when we kill and eat billions of animals every day.
- TheCondor 11y ago
  There is a giant difference between feeding some and some of the "behavioral" experiments mentioned in the article. Why do cats play with mice? Are cats evil?
  - hartator 11y ago
    Cats are evil obviously.
  - saint_fiasco 11y ago
    To be fair, factory farming is pretty awful.
kingkawn 11y ago
I did animal research for a few months before I couldn't take it anymore. The standards are for PR, are hardly enforced, and nobody cares beyond not looking bad. I don't care what they say they do, if they are taking the initial step of choosing to use animals theyre a poor choice for self-enforcement of animal welfare.
reasonattlm 11y ago
Animal experimentation is horrible and terrible. Even in the most ethical of studies suffering is inflicted upon animals that otherwise would not have happened; entire genotypes of animals doomed to additional suffering have been bred in some cases. But the alternative is far worse: to not perform these animal studies, or rather for some privileged group to use force to prevent others from performing such studies, and so bring progress in medicine to a grinding halt. Without animal studies there would be no new meaningful advances in medical science. It is a harsh and unpleasant aspect of the human condition that forcing suffering upon animals in the course of scientific studies is necessary to advance both human and veterinary medicine. A few suffer for the benefit of many - an equation that should make any sane and compassionate person uncomfortable. Animal studies are even required to refine the science needed to move beyond animal studies. Ethics and morality aside, studies employing animals are expensive and time-consuming. Given the choice, scientists would much rather experiment on cells in a dish, or on slabs of unfeeling cultured tissue, or upon simulations of animals, if these methods would generate results of the same quality. In comparison to what might be and what is possible, we live in a barbaric age of suffering, war, death, and sundry other horrors that we like to keep behind the curtains and out of the mind's eye. But barbaric as it is, this age is far better than the past by all such measures. We no longer absolutely, definitely need to slaughter animals for food to sustain the populace, for example, and rates of violence between humans are far lower than in the pre-modern era of tribes and universal poverty. The option stands open today for a society of vegetarians: it is practical from a technological and economic standpoint. That we have not moved rapidly in that direction is our shame, and our descendants will look back on us as savages for this and many other reasons. Those people who criticize and take action against the use of animals in medical research should first look to their diets, and then to the practice of farming animals. Vast and expansive animal suffering is caused in the name of putting meat into the marketplace - greater many times over each month than in all the animal experiments in modern history. Persuade the omnivores of the human race to relinquish their participation in the meat market before savaging the medical science that will benefit both man and beast. In short, the human condition is a rotted, cloying swamp, but we're closer to the edge than we were - no longer up to our necks in it, we now have the luxury of finding more of our surroundings to be disgusting and primitive. The way out to solid ground is forward, through more of the same, until our biotechnology becomes good enough to do away with the suffering we must inflict upon animals in order to build better medicine. Perhaps along the way, societies will arise whose members also reject the needless suffering we presently choose to inflict upon animals in order to eat the same diet as our ancestors.
sam____ 11y ago
If that is Paul's belief system, he sold it out awfully quickly because he was "fascinated by one class lab". He is now "astonished that the daily grind of depriving, shocking and killing these animals did not move me to leave my job." He quit because he lost interest and wanted to be a programmer, stealing a lab coat in the process... I don't mean to be too harsh, but the thing that comes through loudest to me is that, by his own measure, Paul may be a bad person.
afarrell 11y ago
If we are to devote resources to preventing humans from assaulting non-humans, should we also devote resources to preventing non-humans from assaulting each other?
pvaldes 11y ago
Puppet activists playing god and destroying the lives of the young researchers whereas everybody treat them as the great hero of the week. Is a problem, yes. To be young an naive and doing silly things trying to impress your crush is understandable and even likeable. But, when your love plan involves to 'morally torture' or destroy lives of other young girls and guys, and millions of dollars in stuff, papers should adopt a more responsible point of view. The type of activism that repeat again and again old dated facts as if were current, is mostly a way to climb up socially at any cost, and to find comfort in the group. No intelligent people can argue that to give a expensive dinner of mouses to the wild cats equals to love or improve the life of those mouses. The peaceful and intelligent lab rats set free ceremoniously, with be soon bitten, chased away and most of them will be ripped in pieces for the wild rats before 24 h. The survivors will last a couple of more miserable days terrified, hungry, bleeding and isolated of their families. This is cruel for a social animal, and not much different to stealing a lap dog from this friend owners and house and releasing it alone in the territory of a wolf pack to be teared apart and eated. Experimentation is mostly a tool to achieve something that a lot of good people disperately need as soon as possible. To make a taboo of this tool will not solve much of our real problems and probably will create a huge amount of human pain. Labs should have sticks with "Is the Thalidomide, stupid" printed in uppercases, and those type of articles should probably be answered also with the same slogan.
- Luc 11y ago
  > Labs should have sticks with "Is the Talidomide, stupid" printed in uppercases, and those type of articles should probably be answered also with the same slogan. This made me smirk, because Thalidomide could be the poster child for the ineffectiveness of animal testing.
  - dhmholley 11y ago
    And unfortunately it often is used that way, by people who don't understand that animal testing would have caught the birth defects had it been tested on pregnant animals (advocating, if anything, for more thorough animal testing, not for animal testing's ineffectiveness). Of course people aren't interested in this, they're just after the conclusion that supports their preconceived ideas.
return0 11y ago
I think modern lab standards are not nearly as horrible. The larger problem is not the harsh treatment, but the huge number of animals that are killed in labs nowadays. There is the prevalent push to publish more and more often, which requires more and more animals in order to report minute results. Rarely do researchers analyze their experiment data to exhaustion; they'd rather run a new experiment than try to figure it out from existing data. If we want to use animals less, we need 1) public availability of all experimental data and 2) more and better computational models that take the bottom-up approach to studying organisms and the brain. Until then we 'll keep piling up dead animals with reckless abandon.
canvia 11y ago
The train of thought that has me leaning towards becoming vegetarian is along the lines of: If an advanced alien species came to Earth, how would I want them to treat humans? How about in the case that they are advanced to a level that comparing their abilities and technology to humans would be the same as comparing human technology and abilities to that of birds or dogs or cows? Would I want them to dismiss our primitive (from their perspective) nests as the work of an unintelligent beast? Would I want them to corral us into pens and feed us fattening foods before harvesting our bodies? Would I want them to feed us hormones and genetically modify our bodies to produce more milk or grow larger muscles for consumption? Would I want them to breed the outliers of our species to create extremely large and extremely small "pure-breeds" of humans as a novelty? Would I want them to dismiss our primitive verbal communication as nothing more than cheerful song and make no attempt at all to understand what we are trying to express?
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Hey! Then they would be just like humans! We do all of that.

71 points by romefort 11y ago

SunShiranui 11y ago

It is paywalled.

danieldk 11y ago
With any such article: Google it, and you can read it without paying.

nosefrog 11y ago

100 years from now, we will look back on the experiments performed on nonhuman animals with the same disgust that we have for the experiments performed on humans by the Nazis. "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." - Martin Luther King Jr.

BringTheTanks 11y ago
You have a somewhat naive view about how our moral compass moves as a straight lines from bad to good. Before the Nazis performed experiments on humans, it was considered horrible to perform experiments on humans. What Nazis had that allowed them to perform experiments on humans was a carte blanche to do whatever they want by contemporary law, and the ideology that those human beings were in fact "inferior" human beings. I don't know if you eat fish, chicken and so on, but probably you don't think of yourself as a Nazi if you would. Because you don't consider a chicken at the same level as a human. And this gives you carte blanche to have chicken for dinner and feel absolutely no remorse. Is it right or wrong? I don't pass judgment. I know all beings have a sense of self and we shouldn't cause pain and take a life for no reason, yet, killing each other and eating each other is part of the cycle of life. I know that if we consider life sacrosanct and we eat chicken fingers at Chipotle, we need ideology to justify our actions, and so we'll consider animals inferior. If we consider them inferior, they'll be target for experiments, because medical science will continue to evolve. Depending on how our culture evolves, the moral compass may move in an entirely different direction, where we stop regarding life of any kind as so precious, even human. We'll acknowledge how replaceable we are, and our mortality. This would enable full legalization of humane practices like assisted death for the heavily disabled and terminally ill, and might open the doors again for experimenting on humans to move medicine forward. You never know.
- randomsearch 11y ago
  "yet, killing each other and eating each other is part of the cycle of life" I'm not sure what "the cycle of life" is, but just because something may be present elsewhere in the animal kingdom does not mean we should replicate it or justify our actions through it.
  - rimantas 11y ago
    It does not mean we shouldn't too.
  - afarrell 11y ago
    But does it mean we should be willing to lock someone else in a cage or ruin their livelihood for doing so?
- nosefrog 11y ago
  In recent history, we have recognized the moral significance of groups that have less power. This has happened (and is currently happening) for black people (and people of color in general), children, women, LGBTQ people, animals that are "like us" (such as elephants and chimpanzees), animals that are our companions (like dogs and cats), and other groups that have been and are currently discriminated against. The pattern that I see is that society is giving moral value to groups that have less power; groups that we have historically harmed without thought. We must define "group" though, because obviously the most powerless things on this planet are plants and inanimate, nonliving objects. And it would be very short-sighted to define "group" as "everything that society currently gives moral value, i.e. all humans and an arbitrary subset of animals". I define "group" as persons that can feel emotion (not necessarily human emotion), have some sense of their environments, and have some sense of desire. In short, our "group" includes all sentient beings. If we follow this line of thought, it feels obvious that all sentient beings will be recognized as valuable. And that the question is not "if", but "when". I want to address your counter example: > This would enable full legalization of humane practices like assisted death for the heavily disabled and terminally ill, and might open the doors again for experimenting on humans to move medicine forward. As a society, we believe that a moral being does not have the right to take their own life. It doesn't say anything about who is or isn't a moral being, which is what I am addressing. The counter example you were looking for was a society where all humans had no moral value. If humans have no moral value, then it does not matter if a human kills themselves, because it also doesn't matter if humans kill and harm each other. Disclaimer: I have lived my entire life in the United States. When I say "society", I usually mean "the west".
Natura 11y ago
Why should we? Right now we need to do this kind of experiments to relieve massive pain from humans. Some tests(not all of them) can't be done without live animals. Why should animal suffer for human? Well human have higher moral value because of higher ability of pain, emotions and cognition. Don't get me wrong given the choice I would stop any animal cruelty if there would be alternative. As far as I know there isn't one. We can't just simply switch to some computer simulation for testing drugs instead of testing them on live animals unfortunately. So stopping animal testing entirely doesn't seem to me to be right, but we should take a closer look at it. Be extremely careful that any harm done to animals is justified, that research being done on them really brings benefits and that we are doing best we can to relieve as much pain as it is possible. I believe that much bigger issue eating meat, where reason why we cause huge amount of pain to animals comes mostly to , because it taste good.
- nosefrog 11y ago
  I do not have an answer to the question of whether experimenting on nonhuman animals can be justified out of necessity. I have some thoughts, though: Assume that in the near future, we give nonhuman animals the same moral value as humans. And then say we wanted to conduct an experiment on an animal to cure a human ailment. Before we harm a nonhuman animal, we need to ask whether we have the right to harm that animal. Because nonhuman animals and humans have the same moral value, this is equivalent to asking whether we would have the right to harm a human in the same position. So right off the bat, our standard for conducting tests on animals is, "would we have the right to conduct this test on a human?" Let's also assume that we believe humans must give consent before we have the right to conduct scientific experiments on them. If we apply this to animals, then we need to determine how to get consent from an animal, which seems hairy. And then there's the question of fairness -- if we've already determined that we have the right to perform this test on a human, and we're trying to cure a human ailment, then isn't it selfish to perform the experiment on a nonhuman animal? But, you may say, what if the gains outweight the cost? If we truly believe that we will gain enough to justify violating the rights of a nonhuman animal, that's consistent with justly violating the rights of a human. And then the question of selfishness comes up again. > I believe that much bigger issue eating meat, where reason why we cause huge amount of pain to animals comes mostly to , because it taste good. I believe they are both big issues. My only advice is to be careful not to fall into the trap of classifying one as a less evil (even though it seems that harming animals for our enjoyment is much worse than harming them out of necessity). If we fight to recognize the moral value of nonhuman animals on all fronts, then the world you wish for (only performing experiments out of extreme necessity) will come too. (This is not a personal jab at you -- it's something I noticed in my own thinking, too.)
rimantas 11y ago
I hope that 100 years from now we will still look at those who could benefit humanity by doing experiments on animals but did not do so for "moral" reasons with disgust.
- thomasahle 11y ago
  With disgust even? What about all those that don't work in a job benefitting humanity, and do so for more selfish reasons than moral?
- nosefrog 11y ago
  > ...we will still look at those who could benefit humanity by doing experiments on animals but did not do so for "moral" reasons with disgust. Do we do that today? If a researcher refuses to harm an animal to further science, do we think less of them?
MrDosu 11y ago
I am reading this while eating a steak. Js.

nailer 11y ago

> That powerful talk made me realize that animals, like us, are sentient beings who have intelligence and experience fear and pain. Well yes, we're animals. I don't understand why adults still think of humans as somehow being not animals.

Netcob 11y ago
Especially the most basic and primitive emotions/sensations that influence our behavior very directly, like pain or panic. I get how fish might not experience "culture shock", "weltschmerz" or "ennui", but most of the things we feel every day aren't special at all.
- pvaldes 11y ago
  I cant see a fish bored perfectly, or experiencing culture shock. Why not?. A lot of people fall in this trap with fishes. "Well, goldfishes are dumb, and goldfishes are fishes, therefore fishes are dumb". To reduce the more diverse type of vertebrates, with more than 30.000 extant species, to the behaviour of a goldfish put in a matchbox of water is extreme oversimplification. Some fishes are very intelligent in fact. Not like an human but much more than a mice or a chicken for sure. Sadly the 90% of philosophers in history just didn't understand what type of creature is a fish and the derived reasoning about those had lead to funny dead ends. But the real problem is that "to be able to feel pain or not" or "to live in water or not" are just subjective lines (Saving lion, moral act. Saving tuna, maybe tomorrow, tunas are dumb). We could also create different laws for vegan species (cow: moral, dog: amoral), or for species that can feel love and care for his descendants (butterfly: amoral, spider: a wonderfully moral creature), or that can feel electromagnetic fields, or that have four extremities with 5 fingers at the end (human good, spider and horses amoral) or that can live longer and pacific lives (humans so-so, sequoia great). The rules of this game are totally artificial from the start.
MrDosu 11y ago
In a word: Lack of education

jobvandervoort 11y ago

I used to do animal experiments and my partner still does them daily. We both had to kill (or as they say in science -sacrifice) the animals ourselves when necessary. There is a very large body of research that couldn't and can't be done without animal experiments. Both in fundamental and clinical sciences. However, what I do see is a movement away from usage of macaques towards a higher usage of experiments using flies. Rodents are fundamental in neuroscience and will stay that for a while, as they are both easy to genetically modify and have reasonably sized brain and organs that is comparable to ours. I've seen several people, PhD students, but also top-level scientists, moving away from using animals or mammals for their experiments because of the same realization that the author had. It's important that we realize what we are doing to the animals, but the end of animal experimentation is not yet in sight.

Lorento 11y ago

Animals suffer horrible lives naturally too, and on a much more massive scale. If you're really against animal suffering and dying then a far bigger problem is the existence of wild animals with peak populations, unreliable food supplies, predators, fights and disease. Stopping animal research is like trying to stop global warming by driving slower. Feels like you're making a difference but you're not .

janxgeist 11y ago
I think this is a weak argument, because you could just as well use it to argue for conducting these experiments on humans: Humans suffer horrible lives naturally too, and on a much more massive scale. If you're really against human suffering and dying then a far bigger problem is the existence of humans with peak populations, unreliable food supplies, murderers, fights and disease. Stopping research on humans is like trying to stop global warming by driving slower. Feels like you're making a difference but you're not.
- XorNot 11y ago
  This is not the slamdunk you think it is. If you could ensure the human population lived to exactly 70 years old and didn't suffer during that time, there is a very fair argument it would be a moral imperative to implement this social order since it would be a massive improvement over the current state of world affairs. Scale down that number to find where you think the line is.
  - janxgeist 11y ago
    I'm not sure I understand you correctly: are you saying that animal experiments would be ethical if they removed all suffering for humans?
- afarrell 11y ago
  Yes, we devote X resources from stopping the suffering of humans at the expense of other humans. We currently only spend Y on stopping the suffering of humans from other causes and Y is not massively greater than X. However, the reasons for that are mostly due to the fact that spending on X also works to preserve the power structures (various government) that we use to direct money toward Y.

jonchang 11y ago

I can say with confidence that this sort of thing would never occur in a modern research laboratory. Note that standards for ethical experimentation on animals (including humans) hadn't really appeared until the 70s and 80s. A couple of points here: Any type of animal experimentation must be accompanied by an IACUC protocol that is approved by a committee, typically at least 3 people, and usually including a veterinarian, research scientists, and layperson. The protocol justifies why using animals is necessary for the research and exactly how the animals will be cared for during the experiments. Performing surgery on live animals - You have to be trained in the procedure by practicing on dead animals first. Any surgery that happens must be done under anesthesia using approved chemicals. For example, in fishes and amphibians, this is an anesthetic dose of MS-222. Sacrificing animals - Typical standards require that the experimenter sacrifice the animal quickly & humanely, using at least 2 methods (chemical and physical) to ensure that the animal is not suffering due to a sublethal dose of your chemical. Again for fishes, this is a lethal dose of MS-222 followed by either pithing or freezing. For rodents this is usually anesthesia followed by cervical dislocation. Experimental endpoints - You will not get your IACUC approved if you don't have a way of dealing with your live animals after your experiment is over. Simply killing them because you don't have money to keep them around is absolutely forbidden. For fishes, they get released back into the ocean or kept around for aquarium outreach purposes. The issue of animal rights is an important one. For example I personally think that the IACUC protocols don't go far enough. Nonvertebrate animals are typically not covered by IACUC at all so this means that it is legally above the board to vivisect slugs without anesthesia. Of course you might not think that slugs deserve rights but this is a debate that needs to happen. In particular many countries do not cover cephalopods (octopuses, squids, etc) under their animal use laws..

Red_Tarsius 11y ago
Thank you for spelling it out. As much as I empathize with the author, these articles are often misused by ignorant activists. In my country, years of research have been ruined thanks to the clueless. http://www.nature.com/news/animal-rights-activists-wreak-havoc-in-milan-laboratory-1.12847?wafflebotCursorId=1366791238000000:0:0 http://www.nature.com/news/animal-rights-activists-wreak-hav...

Luc 11y ago

Reading 'Animals Like Us' by Mark Rowlands made me realize that it is utterly reasonable to abstain from harming animals. There is a string of logic, starting from very basic principles of ethics, that makes it the rational thing to do (if you accept the basic principles). It's a sort of ethical math. Most people don't do the math because it's not obvious that some thought is needed, instead going with their gut feeling. http://www.amazon.com/dp/1859843867/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/1859843867/

MrDosu 11y ago
You are not going to get a vaccination against HIV for example without animal experimentation at the current state of science. My parents work in the field and I have worked at a few labs where they do animal experimentation. It's not as bad as the press makes it out to be. People don't work around animals their entire lives without caring about them.
- Luc 11y ago
  Rowlands does a good job of dealing with these two arguments in his book. Like I said, I think it takes careful thinking, and a book is a good conduit for that.
philwelch 11y ago
Sorry, but starting from reasonable-sounding principles of ethics and following their logical consequences is how I became an anarcho-capitalist in my early 20's. Ethics can't be reduced to math.
- Luc 11y ago
  I don't think caring for the well being of animals is that far out of the mainstream of ethical thinking. Besides, it's my own take on the book, and perhaps Mark Rowlands wouldn't even recognise it from my description. Perhaps I didn't do it justice.
  - philwelch 11y ago

howling 11y ago

I always wonder why people feel so upset over millions of animals being experimented every year when we kill and eat billions of animals every day.

TheCondor 11y ago
There is a giant difference between feeding some and some of the "behavioral" experiments mentioned in the article. Why do cats play with mice? Are cats evil?
- hartator 11y ago
  Cats are evil obviously.
- saint_fiasco 11y ago
  To be fair, factory farming is pretty awful.

kingkawn 11y ago

I did animal research for a few months before I couldn't take it anymore. The standards are for PR, are hardly enforced, and nobody cares beyond not looking bad. I don't care what they say they do, if they are taking the initial step of choosing to use animals theyre a poor choice for self-enforcement of animal welfare.

reasonattlm 11y ago

Animal experimentation is horrible and terrible. Even in the most ethical of studies suffering is inflicted upon animals that otherwise would not have happened; entire genotypes of animals doomed to additional suffering have been bred in some cases. But the alternative is far worse: to not perform these animal studies, or rather for some privileged group to use force to prevent others from performing such studies, and so bring progress in medicine to a grinding halt. Without animal studies there would be no new meaningful advances in medical science. It is a harsh and unpleasant aspect of the human condition that forcing suffering upon animals in the course of scientific studies is necessary to advance both human and veterinary medicine. A few suffer for the benefit of many - an equation that should make any sane and compassionate person uncomfortable. Animal studies are even required to refine the science needed to move beyond animal studies. Ethics and morality aside, studies employing animals are expensive and time-consuming. Given the choice, scientists would much rather experiment on cells in a dish, or on slabs of unfeeling cultured tissue, or upon simulations of animals, if these methods would generate results of the same quality. In comparison to what might be and what is possible, we live in a barbaric age of suffering, war, death, and sundry other horrors that we like to keep behind the curtains and out of the mind's eye. But barbaric as it is, this age is far better than the past by all such measures. We no longer absolutely, definitely need to slaughter animals for food to sustain the populace, for example, and rates of violence between humans are far lower than in the pre-modern era of tribes and universal poverty. The option stands open today for a society of vegetarians: it is practical from a technological and economic standpoint. That we have not moved rapidly in that direction is our shame, and our descendants will look back on us as savages for this and many other reasons. Those people who criticize and take action against the use of animals in medical research should first look to their diets, and then to the practice of farming animals. Vast and expansive animal suffering is caused in the name of putting meat into the marketplace - greater many times over each month than in all the animal experiments in modern history. Persuade the omnivores of the human race to relinquish their participation in the meat market before savaging the medical science that will benefit both man and beast. In short, the human condition is a rotted, cloying swamp, but we're closer to the edge than we were - no longer up to our necks in it, we now have the luxury of finding more of our surroundings to be disgusting and primitive. The way out to solid ground is forward, through more of the same, until our biotechnology becomes good enough to do away with the suffering we must inflict upon animals in order to build better medicine. Perhaps along the way, societies will arise whose members also reject the needless suffering we presently choose to inflict upon animals in order to eat the same diet as our ancestors.

sam____ 11y ago

If that is Paul's belief system, he sold it out awfully quickly because he was "fascinated by one class lab". He is now "astonished that the daily grind of depriving, shocking and killing these animals did not move me to leave my job." He quit because he lost interest and wanted to be a programmer, stealing a lab coat in the process... I don't mean to be too harsh, but the thing that comes through loudest to me is that, by his own measure, Paul may be a bad person.

afarrell 11y ago

If we are to devote resources to preventing humans from assaulting non-humans, should we also devote resources to preventing non-humans from assaulting each other?

pvaldes 11y ago

Puppet activists playing god and destroying the lives of the young researchers whereas everybody treat them as the great hero of the week. Is a problem, yes. To be young an naive and doing silly things trying to impress your crush is understandable and even likeable. But, when your love plan involves to 'morally torture' or destroy lives of other young girls and guys, and millions of dollars in stuff, papers should adopt a more responsible point of view. The type of activism that repeat again and again old dated facts as if were current, is mostly a way to climb up socially at any cost, and to find comfort in the group. No intelligent people can argue that to give a expensive dinner of mouses to the wild cats equals to love or improve the life of those mouses. The peaceful and intelligent lab rats set free ceremoniously, with be soon bitten, chased away and most of them will be ripped in pieces for the wild rats before 24 h. The survivors will last a couple of more miserable days terrified, hungry, bleeding and isolated of their families. This is cruel for a social animal, and not much different to stealing a lap dog from this friend owners and house and releasing it alone in the territory of a wolf pack to be teared apart and eated. Experimentation is mostly a tool to achieve something that a lot of good people disperately need as soon as possible. To make a taboo of this tool will not solve much of our real problems and probably will create a huge amount of human pain. Labs should have sticks with "Is the Thalidomide, stupid" printed in uppercases, and those type of articles should probably be answered also with the same slogan.

Luc 11y ago
> Labs should have sticks with "Is the Talidomide, stupid" printed in uppercases, and those type of articles should probably be answered also with the same slogan. This made me smirk, because Thalidomide could be the poster child for the ineffectiveness of animal testing.
- dhmholley 11y ago
  And unfortunately it often is used that way, by people who don't understand that animal testing would have caught the birth defects had it been tested on pregnant animals (advocating, if anything, for more thorough animal testing, not for animal testing's ineffectiveness). Of course people aren't interested in this, they're just after the conclusion that supports their preconceived ideas.

return0 11y ago

I think modern lab standards are not nearly as horrible. The larger problem is not the harsh treatment, but the huge number of animals that are killed in labs nowadays. There is the prevalent push to publish more and more often, which requires more and more animals in order to report minute results. Rarely do researchers analyze their experiment data to exhaustion; they'd rather run a new experiment than try to figure it out from existing data. If we want to use animals less, we need 1) public availability of all experimental data and 2) more and better computational models that take the bottom-up approach to studying organisms and the brain. Until then we 'll keep piling up dead animals with reckless abandon.

canvia 11y ago

The train of thought that has me leaning towards becoming vegetarian is along the lines of: If an advanced alien species came to Earth, how would I want them to treat humans? How about in the case that they are advanced to a level that comparing their abilities and technology to humans would be the same as comparing human technology and abilities to that of birds or dogs or cows? Would I want them to dismiss our primitive (from their perspective) nests as the work of an unintelligent beast? Would I want them to corral us into pens and feed us fattening foods before harvesting our bodies? Would I want them to feed us hormones and genetically modify our bodies to produce more milk or grow larger muscles for consumption? Would I want them to breed the outliers of our species to create extremely large and extremely small "pure-breeds" of humans as a novelty? Would I want them to dismiss our primitive verbal communication as nothing more than cheerful song and make no attempt at all to understand what we are trying to express?

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Hey! Then they would be just like humans! We do all of that.