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.