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Comment by brian-armstrong | Hacker News Reader

I can’t help but feel a little bad about the mass amputation happening in these labs. Of course these are lower animals, but don’t we lose a little of our humanity doing this?

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But we kill millions of animals every day for eating and not because we need to, because we enjoy it.

This x 1000. The chicken, beef and pork you eat is probably treated worse than the mice in the labs.

If you at all care about Animal welfare then spend sometime researching into Animal farming. It gets dark pretty fast.

Most people don’t know how their chicken gets to the shelves.

I think this is more of a problem in certain parts of the world than it is in others—particularly those parts that receive large subsidies to increase production capacity so as to fuel discounts that would draw otherwise hesitant commercial activity.

This is an important question, but it's also been debated to death in the scientific community.

I have a friend who raises mice and then has to break their necks to euthanize them before experimenting on them. Another of my friends has to give mice cancer.

The former friend's lab has come up with life-changing treatments for muscular diseases, and the latter friend is helping to develop immunotherapy methods.

While it's awful to think about the price, it's important to think about why the price is paid and how much suffering can be prevented.

Another note: there are strict codes of ethics for how animals are treated in labs, so in most reputable organizations, the suffering is as minimal as possible (sometimes no suffering at all).

I really wish there was more oversight into Animals being used for testing.

Dogs are probably the most humane treated animals on the planet. I wish other animals got the similar treatment as well.

Would love to read some of those debates. Don’t get me wrong. I am in support for using mice for medical reasons.

In most countries, there is an ungodly large amount of oversight that goes into animals used in scientific research. The problem is that when the media reports animal testing, they skew the facts in order to make them sound dramatic, when in reality animal well-being is taken very seriously. Lab mice in general live much better lives than your pet mouse.

I didn’t know about this. I think my impressions have mostly come from movies like “planet of apes” so yes, they have been skewed by media.

If you care about animal cruelty, the real problems are habitat loss leading the starvation and habitat loss, followed by overhunting/fishing, followed by industrial scale agribusiness where animals are kept in horrible conditions for life, followed by shitty slaughter practices of some small scale farmers, then shitty pet owners, and waaaay down at the bottom is researchers who sometimes treat the animals poorly.

My friend has to take a rat and surgically implant an EEG electrodes to their brains, then put the processing unit in their belly, sew them back up. They typically die within 3 weeks or so, usually in a lot of pain.. but the researchers gather valuable data regarding their lifecycle.

With this method, they've been able to develop medication for a few diseases that save thousands to tens of thousands of humans a year (related to epilepsy).

Is it wrong?

Morally, more people are saved from this experiment, than the rats that gave their lives and far more "suffering" has been removed. On the other hand, that depends on your moral code. For me, it's about "what helps / makes me suffer less (short and long-term", so I think it's fine! For others, it's society, it's about the net positive for society - for them it's also fine. So, really, it's just those who empathize with the animals; which I think we all do, we just balance the perspective.

Personally, I couldn't do it, but I support the net gain to society.

> Morally, more people are saved from this experiment

That's not the biggest difference though. The elephant in the room is that animals are not humans, and they are worth less than humans. Else, why not use humans?

The article mentions planaria, a type of flatworm that can regenerate from a small piece of tissue. Many experiments with these animals involve cutting them up various ways.[0]

I agree that animal testing is integral to modern medicine, but I also agree with the parent that unnecessarily inflicting pain on even lower animals reflects badly on humanity. How many of these experiments are actually necessary? Do research institutions make the researcher convince them that the suffering is really necessary for medicine, rather than merely to satisfy some curiosity?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian#Regeneration As a side note, the next section of the Wikipedia article, describes even more grotesque experiments.

If they regrow it and it is painless... it is like removing the wool from a sheep.

Why would it be painless?

If the chances of dying after loosing a limb aren't very high it just doesn't make sense to develop (extreme) pain from an evolutionary perspective.

The chance of me dying from placing my finger on the stove is 0%, but I assure you the pain is severe.

You can't regrow your finger, and having working fingers would've been useful for survival for nearly 100% of your ancestors (the ones that had digits, that is).

There are lizards who lose their tails painlessly as a way to escape predators. If they felt pain in that situation, they might die, so it would've been selected out over time.

Yeah but regrowing limbs arrived after, it's built on top of their tetrapod ancestry. So it's entirely possible that pain is still here as a leftover from when it was a very critical condition.

They have a nervous system and DO feel pain, afaik the extent of pain they feel is not really known. A vet had to amputate a limb of an Axolotl I keep as a pet because he got into a fight with another one and he did not even finch.

I am roughly equal parts excited and sad.

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