Should we search for empathy the hard way in these scientists too ?
Where do you stop? Do you stop eating bread because there are bits of mice/crickets in it? Do you stop eating carrots, because a family of rabbits might depend on it? Do you stop eating bread because a strain of fungus (which aren't plants and are capable of moving on its own volition) might depend on it?
Killing lab mice to develop life saving medicine is fine with me in most cases. Torturing mice to study empathy probably isn't.
Either way, besides killing all the lab mice, we can also just stop breeding them, you know.
First they weren't "torturing mice for empathy", they were studying them for examining pain receptors.
Second the study was used to determine if something has empathy or not. Imagine if tomorrow we discovered that large rocks posses sentience, would you not want to determine that rocks have sentience, even if you have been milling them into concrete.
> Either way, besides killing all the lab mice, we can also just stop breeding them, you know.
A) Release them into general mice populace causing potential short term damage by having too many breedable mice, while their genes are potential long term damage to mice population (mice used to test cancer get cancer really quickly)?
B) Feed them and chemically castrate them and or keep them in isolation (solitary confinement, yay!). Costs money, not sure if departments have that much free dough lying around
C) Kill them painlessly and efficiently?
D) Sell them at a loss as pets, even though they aren't suitable as pets (some of the strains die really really quickly, because they are bred for that).
Secondly, are you seriously suggesting that we should keep breeding and killing lab mice because otherwise we might have to kill them? I can't even understand how can this make any sense. And nobody here is arguing for stopping all the animal research tomorrow. If demand drops, breeders will simply breed less of them. How is this a difficult concept?
> I was arguing against your absurd statement that since eating bread can kill some mice, doing any kind of research on mice is fine.
I was arguing against notion that somehow removing lab mice will make stuff better, for anyone. Humans won't get data needed to design various drugs, mice overall will continue to suffer, since I believe that lab mice make a small set of all living mice.
And in my opinion, yes, we should let some people die. My thought had always been that for the people on death row, when the day of their lethal injection comes, they should have the option to either be put to death or to donate their body to science for testing. If they should choose testing, they can also opt out at any, in which case they would be given the lethal injection the following day.
The models aren't there yet, but once we develop those, we could try phasing out lab studies.
120 F isn't that hot, it only hurts after a while, and the mouse can take its tail out at any time. That's how they were able to detect the effect; the mice that saw the other mice do the test took their tails out faster because they knew it'd eventually hurt based on the prior mouse's reaction.
"Though he hurts mice for a living, Mogil says it's not for a lack of his own empathy. He research is about understanding why two people may experience pain in different ways, with the hope of developing better pharmaceuticals for managing it. "My sympathy is mostly reserved for chronic pain patients," Mogil tells me. For decades, Mogil and his team have conducted experiments testing the pain threshold of mice in order to see what role genetics play in pain tolerance."
There are human studies on pain reception where people are exposed to cold water, where extreme cold water is reported to use similar pain receptors as heated water but cause less damage to the skin. Researchers also injects subjects with capsaicin (Mythbusters did this on camera in one episode), and I wonder why vinegar was used here.
Same as: "My sympathy is mostly reserved for black child slaves than for the white child slaves."
There is no difference! These who fails to see that can be said to have a degree of lack of empathy.