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Comment by dexwiz | Hacker News Reader

From what I heard, the pig lived a relativity good life. It was well cared for by the large animal veterinary school on campus. Had more space and better food than any factory raised pig. All experiments passed an ethics review. The pig was anesthetized before any procedure. The number of experiments may sound barbaric on the surface, but it was to reduce the overall number of pigs used in trials.

Modern medicine would not be possible without animal trials. Lab-on-a-chips may reduce the need in the future, but animals will still be required for device testing that needs an entire structure, not just a few cells. Different people may weigh the ethical dilemma differently, but when it's your loved dying due a heart defect I am willing to bet you will still choose a treatment tested on animals.

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Thanks for your clarification. It's good to read that the pig was well cared and experiments passed ethics reviews. To be fair your original comment was lacking this information, hence when I first read it felt (unintentionally as we can see now) a bit cold-hearted to me as well.

Honestly, I felt that the ethics board part was implied. In western universities it's very hard to do animal testing. No one just strolls down to Pets Mart and picks up some mice. The Animal Welfare Act governs animal testing in the United States, and school risk funding if they don't follow the law. To be honest, I don't know the ins and outs of the specific programs. I just know they had to present and get their protocol (experiment) approved. It was a serious thing to present, not a rubber stamp process. If you want more details, I found this doc from my school. Purdue does biomedical testing and is also a premiere large animal veterinary school.

https://www.purdue.edu/research/regulatory-affairs/animal-re...

I know University of Calgary had a bio professor who got in hot water for abusing animals (essentially: he encouraged his student to not anaesthetize animals before surgery to fudge numbers). So there are definitely grad students who will happily torture animals if it can help their career.

Damn, they require you to tell them how many mice you've got so you can get that many anaesthesis doses? That rule wasn't thought through.

It is common to use ketamine for anesthesia in animal testing. It's a controlled drug, so you have to keep a pretty good log of it's use.

How many Mice do you have?

800,000.

You used ketamine for all of them?

YES.

Thats a lot of ketamine

YES.

Can you show us the mice?

NO.

Why not

We disposed of their bodies after the experiment.

Then how can we verify the data from the experiment?

Give us ketamine for 800,000 more mice

Given the amounts of bureaucracy involved, you are probably better off getting your ketamine on the black market.

Not sure where it came from, but there is a popular notion that scientists are somehow more moral than everyone else. Obviously that's not true. A lot of terrible things were made and many terrible acts committed by scientists. They can be just as depraved as the rest of us.

The two things you mention are not necessarily in opposition:

The average scientist could be much more moral than the average human, and you could still get the occasional mad man; just need a large enough population of scientists.

Do you EAT pig?

Yes, frequently.

lol that's it? If they said something like "how you feel about it is inconsequential" I would accept it as a pragmatic/stoic way to look at it. There is no way a life in a lab can be even remotely good, well cared or not, but it's hard to compare when a typical life of a pig ends with being slaughtered, only to end up expired pieces of meat most of the times.

How do you think a life of a pig would end if it wasn't being slaughtered? Most likely it would be half-eaten alive by a predator and the rest left to rot or be taken by scavengers. The same thing will happen now (the expired pieces of meat will mostly become food for insect larvae) except it's a human doing the slaughtering and the animal is killed before being eaten.

the life of such pig would not even begin, which is a good thing, if wasn't for human to have so much meat on display that it gets expired.

Sorry, I didn't understand what you mean. Can you type more carefully? English is not my first language and I can't guess what you're trying to say.

Wishing you had never been born is one thing, wishing someone/something else had never been born is not a response of empathy but rather personal guilt.

This is not even a question, being born into a life of slavery and ultimately being slaughtered is worse than not being born. Think about it, you are born into a prison and given no chance to even develop a proper consciousness. This is very different than a fully aware human getting locked up in a prison.

However since the individual being born is not making the choice, it falls to the individual or group benefitting from the individual being born into the circumstance you described. Universal morality is a form of anthropomorphization, or projecting human characteristics onto an amoral natural world.

This is like the pro life argument.

I love it when people are so argumentative about such a simple thing. We are talking about birth control, there is no individual exists to make any choice.

> Projecting human characteristics onto an amoral natural world.

this is not a bad thing comparing to the alternative which is assuming that animals are too dumb to be sympathize with

I don't know that all slaves would agree with you.

I made that last sentence just to preemptively respond to your argument.

Also live stock is much worse than slavery

Empathy does not result in anyone trying to end suffering of another being but the own personal suffering they have through the empathetic connection, and thus they seek to end the suffering of others only because it causes them to suffer.

also they said it as if the validity of our ideas is determined from our motivation, guilt is bad, empathy is good

This line of argument also supports the extermination of all living beings because it prevents all future suffering. Think about that before you use it.

No, because I never claimed that preventing suffering is the only goal. Just add one more goal which is potentially experiencing pleasure then you can justify most lives, well except that of those pigs

In which case it becomes an optimization problem where you have to find the optimal number of living beings to exterminate in order to provide the maximal amount of pleasure for those remaining. Not any better.

> find the optimal number of living beings to exterminate

you are conflating birth control with "exterminate", not the same thing. Birth control has its roles, does it not?

> in order to provide the maximal amount of pleasure for those remaining.

I never said that, pleasure is an example, society is optimized for way more variables that suffering and pleasure.

In the context of farm animals, it looks like the only purpose for the pigs to exist is to be food, then when the food is over-produced and wasted, then you have to question why have that many of them born into a miserable life then die pointlessly.

> Not any better

just say it like that, no explanation? What is not good? Optimization?

I see it a bit different. Using your own sentence structure:

"The line of argument supports the prevention of the existence of an undefined number of living beings to max. the quality of life of other existing living beings."

The argument doesn't seem to me as simple as you are portraying it and I don't see where you got the extermination part from.

> the life of such pig would not even begin, which is a good thing

The comment I was responding to said nothing about increasing the quality of life of any living beings. It only asserted that non-existence is a good thing. I made the assumption that they came to that conclusion based on the reasoning that a pig that does not exist cannot suffer. I made the extension that you can also prevent suffering by immediately ending a life. Yes, there is a distinction between failing to breed another generation and immediately killing all members of the current generation but the end result is the same.

> It only asserted that non-existence is a good thing

this phrasing is really disingenuous. What I said was non-existence in case of farm pigs is a good thing. Try to make less sweeping over-generalized statements, especially when responding to people who aren't doing that

> I made the extension that you can also prevent suffering by immediately ending a life

oh cool thought, did you just bring that up to argue with yourself? Because no one said anything like that prior.

Morality doesn’t exist. It arises from the emotional responses of those with the power to prevent actions they disagree with or perpetuate ones they do agree with. Social contract theory.

and? How am I suppose to think and act if I believe in that theory?

Also, we are saving human lives. With success in this procedure, we could be saving your/our loved ones.

From the article:

“This is a truly remarkable breakthrough,” [the patient] said in a statement. “As a heart transplant recipient, myself with a genetic heart disorder, I am thrilled by this news and the hope it gives to my family and other patients who will eventually be saved by this breakthrough.”

Sure, perhaps it can be justified by the greater good, but that should not preclude feeling sorry for the animal in question.

Who said you're not allowed to feel sorry for it?

I feel like OP is being strawmanned. It's not like dexwiz said "fuck pigs test em more".

Well the grandparent responded to a comment observing no sympathy being shown, with a comment that showed no sympathy, instead with reasoning for why it's worthwhile, and downplaying any suffering. I am not saying dexwiz was encouraging/promoting suffering of pigs, but they were ignoring the original call to express sympathy to these animals.

People can feel sympathy without displaying it on queue for your gratification.

I think your missing the point I am trying to make. Hint: It's not for my gratification, I am not asking people to show sympathy.

Ironically, you accuse people of "strawmanning", and then proceed do the same to me.

Perhaps take a leaf out of your own book and stop assuming intent.

Have a splendid day.

> with a comment that showed no sympathy

> but they were ignoring the original call to express sympathy to these animals.

How is this not asking people to show sympathy?

It's not for show. As I said it was weird IMO that no concern for the pig was expressed. Given their capacity for suffering I would hope that people genuinely feel concern, which is not an invitation for hollow expressions of pity. Just doing that wouldn't make a lack of concern any less strange to me.

But dexwiz apparently enquired, or was at least aware that it seemed to have a reasonably good life. I guess that addressed my comment.

It’s perfectly fine to feel sorry for the animal but there is no moral obligation for others to do so.

Only because technically we have no obligation of any kind to feel anything for anything.

But if a human was being experimented without their informed choice we would have a moral obligation to try to inform them, free them, to enquire about their welfare. What's the basis for thinking it be so different for other animals?

And if you're thinking 'but we can't obtain their informed choice' maybe we have our answer.

Yeah thanks for clarifying.

As for the loved one argument, probably. But that wouldn't necessarily make me right. In fact my proximity to the situation would probably make any objective evaluation of what's right or wrong impossible. That would effectively remove my credibility as a reasonable interlocutor when discussing the ethics at all, like a cop in a ticking time-bomb scenario isn't the best person to call on to craft torture policy.

It wasn't my intention to judge (I don't know your position on anything) it just stood out to me. Animals often aren't treated with much respect or concern, especially ones suffering for our benefit. That's not a comment on you.

> The number of experiments may sound barbaric on the surface, but it was to reduce the overall number of pigs used in trials.

You should read ‘ The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’.

‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas into a different Omelas with a lot more suffering children’

Weird that these statements are made (and I don't mean by you, it's a trope to make them by people in general in discussions like this, I'm not picking you out) that it somehow justifies, or ameliorates, the awfulness of experimenting then dissecting (as someone said) a helpless intelligent creature.

I think these statements justify animal trials and using it to benefit humans definitely. But it doesn't justify or make better that it's still an awful thing to do to an animal and for the animal I think. It's weird right like where they get the blood of some sort of poor little sea creature that's got a blue copper containing blood it's just awful.

I really think we need to revise and reform a lot of how industry interacts with and especially commoditizes animals. I'm not saying we need to be vegans at all but I think there's so much room for improving how we talk think and act about this stuff. To make I guess what is probably an obvious point but I think the reasonableness of that point is not obvious but I think it can be a reasonable and obvious point without really attacking anybody and that non-threatening nature of that reasonable and obvious point I think is what is important about what I'm saying. It's possible. Less this comment be dismissed as some sort of low effort outrage--my heart's beating 50 beats a minute right now I'm not upset. I just think we can improve things there massively but that doesn't make anybody a monster.

If you can accept humans can eat helpless intelligent creatures, then the fact we perform ethics-reviewed anesthetised procedures and later dissect the same animals really shouldn't keep you up at night.

>If you can accept humans can eat helpless intelligent creatures

Not only we can heat... we stuff our faces into it several times a day and we keep rearranging the forms we eat it.

We even make an effort to make it more enticing to children in the form of small golden nuggets like it's some sort of a treasure of flavor.

> treasure of flavor.

Heck yea, it is!

Why are you so focused on the western context for animal experiments? I'm sure it's more comforting to think about ethics boards and well run universities. But there are exemptions for militaries and other loopholes for smaller creatures, regular stories of abuse in labs, to say nothing of ghastly experiments done in China, which doesn't have ANY national or regional protection laws, among other countries.

The post was about human consideration of animals as a resource generally.

It's not much of an argument saying that since eating animals is a thing, (the comfortably narrowly selected example of) other things we do with them is no cause for questions.

If you think that humans make terrible things to animals, you should check what they do to other humans. There are "beautiful, human" stories about a certain Dr. Mengele, or Unit 731 or Guantanamo...

The weird thing was, the parties from the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese Army, responsible for atrocious experiments on humans, were pardoned by the allies in exchange for their findings and research results.

The Allies never pardoned Mengele. He escaped capture and execution due to a combination of bureaucratic bungling (he was captured by the US in 1945, and while in custody his name was added to a list of wanted major war criminals, but somehow the list never made it to the POW camp authorities until after they'd already released him), then the US government somehow forming the false belief that he had already died, then the obstacles Mossad encountered trying to track him down in early 1960s Argentina, then Mossad deciding that the security threat posed by the Arab states (in the years leading up to the Six Day War) was a higher priority, and that by the time (1985) that public pressure had built to the point that the Israeli, West German and US governments were motivated to make a serious effort to find him, he had already died (while vacationing under a false name in Brazil in 1979).

He escaped justice through ineptitude, lack of political will and competing priorities, luck, and the assistance of the Nazi underground, not due to any active decision to forgive his monstrous deeds.

Unlike Nazi rocket science, Nazi human experiments didn't produce very valuable results.

Totally agree...and the asymmetry in where people are sympathetic toward abused animals, but not towards people...is very fucking strange.

Oh really? So people can be cruel to each other? Great insight.

Whataboutism. This was about animal treatment.

> But it doesn't justify or make better that it's still an awful thing to do to an animal and for the animal I think.

Utilitarian vs deontology ethics.

Most people believe that it's better for one pig to suffer than for thousands of people to die.

Even the strictest of vegans I know do not oppose animal testing in medicine if it is done to save human suffering.

So the bar for how well we treat other animals is now "is it having a better life than a factory farmed animal"? We have a long way to go don't we?

It's also a better life than what most animals have in the wild. The wild isn't some fairytale happy place; it's a place of hunger, fear, brutality, pain and disease.

It reminds me of the old saying: "they overexaggerated the aggressiveness of European wolves, they're only dangerous when hungry". Ok, so did European wolves just go to the shop to buy food when hungry?

so by your logic as per statement #1: do you think an iron age peasant, who undoubtably would have had a more brutal life than us, would have swapped their freedom and way of life for being kept in a cage, being experimented on by technology they would find to be terrifying dark magic that could kill them at any moment (see above commenter's mention of the pigs having heart attacks), all for some basic but guaranteed food each day?

Well, yes. You even have people like that right now (for even far smaller of a compensation).

It's really strange to me how these topics lately have tendency to devolve info infantile exchanges like the one above, where the first statement only serves to demonstrate author's emotional bona fides and the second validate and assuages it by offering a platitude. This is how one would interact with a child.

EG:

Op -2: Awww but pigs, I like pigs

Op -1: They were happy pigs

People forget about how hard it is to get through ethics reviews for animal testing. I remember a PI telling me that it was easier to run psych experiments on undergrads compared to rats or mice.

As it should be. Undergrads can give consent, rats and mice can’t.

It depends on the age of the undergrad and what country they are in.

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