I understand the need to test pain response for medical purposes, but I can't shake the feeling that in a few hundred years we're going to look back on the use of animals in pain studies and think it's barbarism.
I do wonder how long it will be before people start vandalizing statues of historical figures because they ate meat.
(Wow, this got off topic quickly.)
They might eyeroll at the "obvious" of "smoke is bad for your lungs, don't mix waste disposal and drinking water" not being able to do something hard isn't reasonable - we might grimace at amputations for gangrene but without suitable antibiotics.
If anything they would judge those who don't adopt when it becomes viable.
It's very likely that people find meat tasty because it's nutritious, just as we find sugar and plant fats tasty. Your comment makes it sound as if eating meat is some kind of indulgence, like eating sweets.
Meat is a rich source of protein and energy. We don't need any more justification than that to want to eat other animals. There are practical matters of efficiency and of the ethics of kiling animals at scale, in industrial farming, that are far more important and interesting to discuss than the nebulous idea of the morality of eating any meat at all.
At the end of the day- many animals eat other animals' meat. Why is it any different for humans to do the same?
>> At least the research animals have some benefit beyond a single person's satiation.
I don't understand this. Even a chicken is large enough to feed two people. Larger animals can feed a family for several days.
Really, it is. It doesn't make a lot of sense to eat meat from an efficiency point of view, or from the sense of impact on the climate.
>Meat is a rich source of protein and energy. We don't need any more justification than that to want to eat other animals.
I don't see how the second sentence follows from the first.
> At the end of the day- many animals eat other animals' meat. Why is it any different for humans to do the same?
Humans plus livestock make up 96% of the biomass of mammals on the planet. Domesticated poultry is 60% of the birds. That makes us a special case in terms of impact, to put it mildly.
From an animal welfare point of view, it's also different to kill a wild animal for food compared to shutting it in a cage and pumping it full of hormones and antibiotics for a few months before killing it.
>> I don't see how the second sentence follows from the first.
It follows because we need protein and energy.
>> That makes us a special case in terms of impact, to put it mildly.
That makes us a special case in the way we find meat to eat.
But why are we a special case when it comes to eating meat?
It's not logical to say we need to tackle the biggest problems first before tackling the smaller problems. Tackling the easier problems first, or tackling as many problems as we can simultaneously makes more sense.
It's also wrong to imply that food is not a major contributor to climate change. It's hard to compare (because of methane emissions v CO2 emissions, food is transported on vehicles etc.) but it looks like food production is similar in impact to transport.
> Why would we first limit a fundamental need
Eating food is a fundamental need, but not eating meat.
Of course farming uses transport, just as everything else does. But the emissions from transporting food come from transport vehicles. I don't see how these must be assigned to farming. If we reduce transport emissions, we'll reduce all transport emissions, including those from transporting food. If we only reduce emissions from farming we'll still have to deal with transport emissions.
In any case, going by the graphs on this wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Anthropogenic_g...
- It really looks like a clear majority of total emissions is from energy production, transport and industry.
It's a question of moral agency. Generally animals are not held to any kind of moral standard at all - no one thinks a dog that bites a child is "evil", just dangerous. You'd be more likely to blame the owner for not training/controlling it properly.
Now, I think the point you're making is that, in terms of moral agency humans are special, so special that we 're not allowed to eat other animals, even though other animals do it (and they'll eat us if given the chance).
Well, I have to say that I've heard the same claim on both sides of the issue. For example, in the past people have claimed that animals don't have a soul, and in modern times, that they don't feel pain (or don't experience it as humans do) or have emotions (or human emotions) and that, therefore, it's fine to treat them anyway we please. In fact, I believe that this special moral agency of humans is used to justify animal experimentation, at least to some degree.
Obviously, I don't think that this idea of special human moral powers holds any water. We're animals like the rest. We 're part of the same food chain, where living things feed off each other. Why should we be treated differently than all those other living things? They can eat us, and each other, we can eat them.
Jonathan Swift argued the same in A Modest Proposal[1]:
> I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.
Swift also argued that eating the babies of the poor also helps prevent famine and breaks the cycle of poverty. Clearly this has more advantages than eating chickens or cows!
> At the end of the day- many animals eat other animals' meat. Why is it any different for humans to do the same?
Animals also rape each other, kill each other over mates and territory, and occasionally commit cannibalism. By your logic, why shouldn’t humans do the same?
> Even a chicken is large enough to feed two people. Larger animals can feed a family for several days.
Depends on the chicken. Almost all male chicks are killed within 3 days of hatching, usually by tossing them into a shredder.[2] I doubt one of them is very filling.
Also: cannibalism, rape, murder etc are illegal in pretty much every territory. What is your point?
Also also: a chicken thrown to the shredder is not eaten, yes.
Can you please explain what you mean without colorful metaphors and attempts at humour? I enjoy those as the next person but they don't help me understand what you mean. If I make an assumption about what you mean and I reply to the assumption in the same way, with metaphors and similes, and you make an assumptiona bout what that meant and reply accordingly, we'll lose the plot very, very quickly.
I'd say avoiding meat could have some health risks.
Unfortunately, like the "doctors" of the bad old days, for medical purposes we don't really have a choice, do we?
We do, however, have a choice when it comes to cosmetics and non-critical research, and I stand by my conviction to use cosmetics not tested on animals exclusively.
However, since testing human medicines on other species does have some sense, we would consider it unethical to run potentially risky tests on humans if that can be avoided by doing preliminary tests on animals instead. If it turns out that some drug which seems safe in vitro actually turns out harmful in the whole organism, then we do want to determine that before trying it out on humans even if that process takes the lives of a lot of lab mice.
If your experimentation kills a patient because you intentionally didn't do the due diligence in order to save some animals, that's not an excuse, that's IMHO as good as murder.
However the hypocrisy of the current state of things is staggering to me. Using words like 'ethical' and 'unethical' makes it worse. Nothing makes a human being's life more important than the life of a lab mouse. To avoid a result "as good as murder" in humans, we are actually murdering other animals.
Is this hyperbole, or do you seriously believe this?
It really should be necessary for people who don't believe it to explain themselves. That is rejecting the null hypothesis, so to speak.
Why does it come down to self awareness and emotional development? Because of suffering? Nothing about this is obvious, but I believe (given lack of evidence to the contrary and given that mice and human brains are similar enough) that mice suffer as much as humans. This is my belief -- not an argument intended to convince others.
> saying that their lives are worth as much as human lives is ridiculous and insulting to all humans.
Anything unconventional is ridiculous. But how is it insulting to humans? Are we supposed to be at the top somehow? This is a religious argument you seem to be making.
This is a touchy topic, and I don't think productive discussion will obtain here, so I will not make any further comments in this thread.
It might not convince you completely of this point, but it will force you to seriously consider your arguments, and is therefore in my opinion a great intellectual exercise.
The level of self awareness is pretty much the only thing we can grade life. I might even like mice, but their lives are endless cycle of eat - fuck - sleep - shit. Human lives are much more productive, creative, interesting and therefore more valuable. And all of that starts with self-awareness.
So let's take it all the way. What makes the life of a lab mouse more valuable than the life of a single cell of yeast?
I think answers about awareness and capability just rationalize the fact that intuitively some life forms are more sympathetic to us than others. We will draw the line at some level of sympathy, but only as far as practicality allows us.
A human life is more valuable than the life of a lab mouse because a human is more sympathetic than a mouse and it is impractical to value lab mice highly. That's the only answer.
Which isn't to say that we necessarily should be interacting with the rest of the universe as though everything is human, because... well honestly I'm not sure I can express the concept in a way that it is even remotely likely to be understood, but I think it would suffice to say that we should not fool ourselves into thinking that we are somehow special and preferred by the universe. We may prefer ourselves simply because we are us, but at the same time our concept of self is incredibly expandable. Even within those arguing against parent there are people willing to include non-human species among that definition because they display similar cognitive qualities, and there are humans who would exclude other humans for various reasons. The line is arbitrary and subjective to the point that I make the following assertion: it is entirely illusory, an imposition of our mind's desire to categorize.
The only "obvious" answer I could see from the perspective of the entire universe is that the value of a single life is zero.
But that perspective isn't useful for most moral decisions.
If you evaluate that mouse = human = nonzero, I don't think that's "completely and obviously true" at all.
Let's remove the issue of human exceptionalism, even. It is not "completely and obviously true" that mouse = tapeworm = nonzero, either.
A lot of your argument is just that humans are not categorically different, which is not the same discussion as whether different species have different multipliers.