Humans need to have some fucking respect.
http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1676-5-horrifyin...
It's always ironic to see animal rights advocates' responses when they are asked if they'd rather volunteer to be the research subjects instead. They are surprisingly reluctant...
This tends to make them ponder a bit more:
"If we hadn't experimented on animals, you might not even be alive today."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...
That might apply to some life-saving drugs.
Cosmetics and weapons are not medicines - far from it.
Claiming that weapons save more people that they kill is simply illogical.
...unless you are implying that this is about saving me personally at the expense of other people lives.
1. How many animals have humans driven to extinction now? Perhaps they would not be extinct were people to treat them with greater respect.
2. If you treat an animal with respect the tables will never have an opportunity to turn, because you won't be blatantly trespassing on it's turf.
Just because we can introspect and consider the ethical state of things doesn't mean we have to abandon all progress and be an agrarian society.
Can we improve? Sure. I don't like to see anything needlessly suffer, but a few bears being killed in the name of science is a drop in the bucket to other concerns.
> Just because we can introspect and consider the ethical state of things doesn't mean we have to abandon all progress and be an agrarian society.
It's exactly because we can introspect and consider the ethical state of things, that means that we should. The fact that you can think and reason about the fact that you're stealing from someone else, or otherwise harming something else, the fact that you are (hopefully) intelligent enough to think of a different way, means that you have a moral duty to be better than that.
You argue that I succumb to the naturalistic fallacy, and yet you are the one doing so. You argue that we do not need an excuse for our behaviour because we are animals, and it is natural for animals to exploit other animals.
In addition to that grave error, you're also making a complete false equivalency in equating "not using a random bear as a test pilot" with "abandoning all progress and becoming an agrarian society".
Edited to clarify: that wasn't a criticism.