The emotional toll of caring for research animals
science.org
science.org
This sounds grim that this is a big push. Scientists not even working on their own animals, leaving technicians to kill them without ever thanking the technician, and the technician never knowing why animals they feed and clean after for years suffer and die.
When we're working with humans taking blood draws, we want trained phlebotomy technicians taking blood draws, not because we're monstrously detached from our subjects, but because our expertise is elsewhere (for example, antibody detection).
If you're working with research animals, you want their care (and yes, their deaths) done and supervised by someone who is an expert in that specifically.
Should researchers see the facilities their animals are housed in, and acknowledge the efforts of those workers? Absolutely. But that's hardly because scientists are uncaring - it's a result of things like the animal housing sites often being at the very periphery of campuses, and science generally having not done a good enough job acknowledging the efforts of technicians in all aspects of science, dating back decades.
Much like meat eaters who avoid slaughterhouses...
Incidentally, I used to work in a bean canning plant. No random members of the public ever visited us.
And certainly not because the plant is hard to get to, where did you even pull that from? The processing plant I worked at didn't even have walls, the whole building was a pavilion. Anybody could have walked in if they wanted to, but nobody ever did.
The meat eater, even if they eat only the minimum they think is nutritionally necessary, and even if they choose meat products from sources that minimize suffering, and even if they raise, care for, and kill the animal themselves, is fundamentally satisfying only their own body.
The scientist, meanwhile, is aiming to build the understanding needed to eradicate illnesses and treat or reverse injuries, both in animals and in humans. They're even interested in building the understanding needed to replace animal meat with, e.g. vat grown meat or plant-based nutritional and culinary equivalents.
The popular image of the scientist is that they are driven chiefly by curiosity. And certainly this is true of many scientists, more in some fields than in others. But there are a lot of scientists who see wrongness in what happens in the universe, and who will push at it until the universe disgorges a way to right it. Many of them are attracted to biology and medicine specifically because that's where the suffering is most obvious.
A think a person like that deserves better than to be compared to a self-interested meat eater.
Researchers have the same incentives as the rest of the population
Researchers work for money, for prestige, ambition and a comfortable job that is white collar and ivory tower in nature.
They are detached from the suffering their work causes.
More importantly, I dont see researchers working for free or minimum wage. Most of their work is not even replicable for the sake of prestige or due to academic pressure. This implies the work is causing pain in animals for objectively their own career protection (selfish).
When we see researchers working for free, producing replicable work that actually adds to society (vs add to the bottom line for a pharma producting a marginal improvement drug) we will call their work altruistic or selfless.
But the fact beyond this caricature is that most of the women and men that work in a lab never develop a phobia towards blood, accept that dealing with death is part of the life, and don't have problems or "emotional tools" with the idea of breeding animals.
We already know that dosages above 10 micrograms/kg of body weight is carcinogenic and should be avoided, so establishing where in the 100,000-300,000 microgram/kg range the LD50 resides does nothing for us.
Unfortunate that not all labs are able to work similarly, especially as you say for doses where we already know harmful levels and LD50 is a bureaucratic requirement or an easy paper.
as someone else noted, a lot of this is done as a form of grant-securing, and it's done on a long-term 'maintenance' basis rather than on experiment-basis.
a 'better option' would be the removal of such political and economical games from facilities that are supposed to be doing research; this reduces the suffering and death without much loss to discovery and progress.
the trick being that we, as humans in this world, have little hope of removing extraneous politics from where they do not belong.
but I just care to point out that we're nowhere-near optimal w.r.t. how we operate in the research sector. it can be better.
The thing is, you can't just start and stop many kinds of animal research. For certain models, there needs to be ongoing maintenance of a breeding population so that that model is available for researchers when they need it for an experiment.
Researchers spend decades making a particular knockout line, and you can't just stick it into a freezer for a rainy day. It has to be maintained or it will no longer exist.
Nobody is getting rich off grants. Then maintenance is a necessity if research gains are to be made on these difficult diseases.
Science isn't done via single experiments - it's done by chains of them.
University administrators and the pharma companies that leverage the "research" to push to market marginal improvement drugs would like to have a word.
It's not that finding a cure to cancer is not important, of course it is, but that doesn't mean the animals need to be treated in deplorable ways. Of course, it's understandable that precautions need to be met and sometimes this means animals need to have reduced contact with other animals and be kept in particular conditions; I worked in immunology for a while so I'm familiar with it.
But I believe the real reason why these animals have to suffer such torture is simply because treating them as best as we could is too expensive and no one wants to pay the cost of animal dignity. No one. So we just justify it saying it's for the greater good.
I mean, it's just a utilitarian position: the potential of millions of lives being improved is worth the suffering of these animals, after all, a human life is much more valuable than an animal life under this frame of reference.
Genuinely ignorant and layperson curious here ... how are these two things connected? There are so many types of cancer that this sounds bold and almost too ... simple?
The key will likely include the ability to induce tolerance or an immune response to a specific antigen and possibly of a specific immune subtype, so as not to derange the entire system. Also, the ability to target medications to specific regions of the body so that the entire immune system is not affected.
Some of this article sounds familiar, including (near the end) the sneaking off to find somewhere to cry. Even though she was pretty tough.
I don't recall her mentioning troubles related to the animals, other than some physical pain related to some of the repetitive movements handling small cages, and being bothered if other techs didn't do the animal care properly.
She did have problems with a clique of other vet techs bullying her. Though some techs were nice, and the supervising vet and the head of the lab were nice to her, and mostly supportive, other than not managing to fix the nastiness problem.
Going only from one person's experience, and this short article:
1. Can the nature of the lab vet tech work lead to, or select for, nastiness in some people?
2. Do labs let some bad behavior slide, due to the difficulty of hiring (given that the work can be rough, and the pay is poor)?
1) Vet techs have been some of the kindest, most patient people I have met. They are humans, which means some of them are nasty, but between the compassion fatigue, the relatively low pay for the amount of training, etc., I don't think "nastiness" is selected for.
2) Difficulty hiring is one. Difficulty firing is another, if they're at a state university. But there is a national shortage of these types of technicians, and it's not a job that can't get done.
Very few new hires have any inkling about any of this when they start, so there's a period of a few weeks where they're forgiven a lot. It's a big ask, because a lot of it is new habits, and some of it can be strange new thinking, too. But ultimately the hires who can't adapt are fired.
Consequently a lot of the hires end up studying animal science or veterinary medicine later on. My point is: the nature of the work that comes before the lab tech work can have an impact, too.
If a virus spread through out the world and only killed psychopaths would the world be better, worse off, or about the same?
I say this purely to foment thought, but think about it, has anyone identified why we even have psychopathy among us? And why many of them are so successful?
Until we do, we're being just as self-indulgent as they are when we get on our high horses with utterances like "psychopaths bad".
Ok, so why do we keep voting them in?
As to why they are successful: cooperation is a more successful strategy than individualism, but cheating is a more successful strategy than cooperation if you can get away with it. Our societies have been largely shaped by cheaters for their benefit so they get away with it a lot, right up until the guillotine comes out.
put it this way, the vast majority of people have difficulty reasoning about emotional topics; I bet psychopaths have no limitation of the sort.
my question to you would be, what if we are in an equilibrium? Perhaps just enough psychopaths exist to “GSD“, but not enough to cause too many problems…
Personally I find this unconscionable, as there's an endless supply of all cancers in most species which would benefit from treatments.
It was an hour run, the time he spoke of it, of absolutely disgusting shame for our species and in particular because these experiments were largely grant securing.
Moral consistency on animal welfare is really hard because we have so many blind spots due to how commonplace some practices are. There is definitely a push for ending things like cosmetics testing on animals[1], but I'm not sure we can or should stop testing things like cancer treatments on animals. At least not until we have viable alternatives.
[1] https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/timeline-cosmetics-t...
Closer to toddlers actually. I'm not a vegetarian or animals rights activist or anything but I'm kind of surprised people eat pigs with how smart they are.
That really depends on what kind of value system you're starting with.
You must really like dogs. Pig intelligence is vastly superior to dog intelligence. Pigs basically are as smart as children, with a full range of emotion. Seriously, stop eating them. Be an example rather than entitled to indulge horrid tastes. We can all live without.
How do you rationalize that? Not many people admit to being aware of the way food animals are treated.
I'm legitimately curious, not trolling.
Third possibility: they have different values which you either don't understand or agree with.
When you say "some people have different values" you probably mean "some people have simply not thought it through". I really don't think there's an ethical framework that favours industrial meat production. But please surprise me.
Now, most people have inconsistent ethics. Which I think is a different thing. I think most people that engage with the industrial meat complex simply ignore the ethical implications, that's actually quite easy to do and even more so when most people are just inconsistent when it comes to ethics. Sometimes people are utilitarians, other times they behave like deontologists and other times they will apply ethics of care.
I believe we are constantly building our own personal ethical frameworks. And that's kind of what you're alluding to, but I also think it's important to acknowledge that consistency is important, and I believe if we really tried to accomplish that most people would be faced with a very harsh reality. It's a struggle but we should be more honest with ourselves and the rest.
The one in which human comfort takes precedence over that of a domesticated species which have been selectively bred over generations to produce meat for consumption. The industrial process is tertiary to the slaughter itself and the economics of meat consumption. You can argue about 'industrialization' of anything -- resource extraction and industrial agriculture at large destroy life on a massive scale.
> When you say "some people have different values" you probably mean "some people have simply not thought it through"
No, some people don't value animal life that has been domesticate specifically for food production. Not many people want a domestic pig in their house, so why do they exist? Not by natural selection and not for their own sake. We made them and we eat them and we don't care because we also don't care about paramecium and the pigs certainly wouldn't care if you were being fed to it, it would just eat you.
> Now, most people have inconsistent ethics.
Sure, I will grant you that and go one further -- all people have inconsistent ethics.
Why do you care about pigs and not amoebas? Is it because one has a brain? Is it because one is multicellular? Is it because one is cute, or intelligent? What are the criteria? List all of your ethical criteria for food consumption and 'willing to argue that people who do it are bad people' and then list the features of everything you do and the consequences of those things and cross reference -- now, when you find a conflict, highlight it and then stop doing it. I bet you can't without seriously inconveniencing yourself to the point where you justify not following through.
> It's a struggle but we should be more honest with ourselves and the rest.
Absolutely agree. Self-awareness is the most important trait. I think that the term 'good person' can be roughly defined to mean 'self-aware and willing to correct after reflection'.
> The one in which human comfort takes precedence over that of a domesticated species which have been selectively bred over generations to produce meat for consumption. The industrial process is tertiary to the slaughter itself and the economics of meat consumption. You can argue about 'industrialization' of anything -- resource extraction and industrial agriculture at large destroy life on a massive scale.
How is human comfort an "ethical framework"? I'm not sure you understand what ethics are.
You can prescribe a value, but if temporary sensory pleasures truly outweigh the entire lives of other beings, there may be neurological issues affecting compassion.
See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19562864/
Most individuals are comfortable admitting that they prefer to not abstain from things like steak and cheese because those things simply taste good. That, to me, is hedonistic pleasure: unnecessary, and an invalid argument for the continued abuse and slaughter of billions of animals around the world.
Many people (including me) do not take any pleasure in eating. In fact it is a chore. If I had to conform to a vegan diet I would literally not get enough nutrients for lack of motivation.
Your own perspective is not the only perspective.
But are you truly convinced that your lack of motivation to properly sustain yourself is worth the needless killing of animals and serious impact on the environment? If you’re here asking about moral frameworks and nitpicking definitions, I don’t think you are.
Make the leap; it’s worth it.
I contend it is not needless, and I contend that you are cause of just as much loss of life as I am through your actions. Though those lives may not meet your qualifications because you also make a judgement about what deserves your empathy and what does not -- and you have every right to. However you have no right to judge others.
People who do that come off like that 'born again' uncle everyone has who you have to avoid because you know that they are constantly thinking about how 'saved' they are and how you are walking the wayward path and every second sentence has to do with Jesus or politics centered around Jesus.
You don't care that he has his beliefs but you realize how he has taken one thing that he feels strong about philosophically and refuses to allow anyone else the same dignity of having their own moral compass free of side-eye and proselytizing. And that makes him extremely annoying to be around.
That's patently false. More than 85 billion land animals alone are slaughtered annually for food. Trillions if you include sea life. Regardless, any incidental deaths like rats or frogs getting crushed while harvesting vegetables are just not on the same ethical plane as factory farmed animals whose entire purpose for existing is to be slaughtered for mere human flavor preference.
In 2023, eating animals is unnecessary.
You can check this external source out as a starting point:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-animal/
Then, evaluate counter-arguments on their merits.
This is a nonsensical statement.
> the evidence simply doesn't support your assertion that vegans cause just as much loss of life as people who regularly eat animals.
We have demonstrated that you ignore the existence of any life form which does not meet you qualifications.
> If I had to conform to a vegan diet I would literally not get enough nutrients for lack of motivation.
I sincerely welcome any credible evidence you can provide that feeding animals plants for years and then slaughtering them for a few meals worth of food somehow equates to less use of virtually any resources compared to just eating the damn plants.
I mean, I guess you come at it from a sort of utilitarian maybe epicurean perspective? The idea of maximising human pleasure? What does the word "comfort" really means in this context? For example, people who take heroin or morphine feel great comfort; should we administer a lethal dosis of morphine to everyone at once? And of course we can argue that industrialization brings destruction I mean a big argument against mass agriculture is precisely that. Some argue that we should go back to more local food sources for this reason, de industralise our society a bit and I can see merit to that.
But really, the question I guess I'm asking is why do you place humans on the center to begin with? Is it because we are capable of overpowering other species and do with them as we want that there is justification to our actions? It seems you're really hammering on the concept of domestication, but why? Why is for example a domesticated pig less worthy of living than a domesticated dog, or a domesticated plant or a human? If someone commits a crime, is it okay for society to punish them in return? What if that person didn't know they were committing a crime, is it still okay to punish them? What if the person does not have the capability to understand that they are committing a crime? What if the person is not a human, but a pig? Is it possible to assign the category of person to an animal? Some philosophers and scientists believe that's a discussion worth having.
It's funny to me that you're taking such a defensive position just at the mention that maybe meat consumption requires a more thorough examination of our personal ethics. I think veganism is a very tough fight in modern society, which is why I think this is an issue that needs to be tackled in a much more systemic way. The first step is just making a societal decision on these questions you ask me. Is a chicken okay? Is a pig okay? Is an amoeba okay? Is a human okay? I think most people will feel disgusted and repulsed at the notion of eating another human being; but why? Is it as significantly different from a pig as a pig is to a plant? Is an amoeba capable of suffering? Do they feel pain? We know for certain that pigs feel pain as we've studied their brains and behaviour but amoeba, for example, don't have any of the necessary cellular components to feel "pain" as animals experience it. But this position can be challenged as well, why pain?
Like you said, there might be a myriad of reasons why someone would find eating animals objectionable and there might be reasons why we might find it necessary as well (for example, health reasons). I am simply wondering "is pleasure reason enough to eat animals the way we eat them?". For you, it seems like pleasure is reason enough, I wonder if you're in favour of the legalisation of all drugs? What about killing people for pleasure, if a serial killer finds infinite pleasure in the act of killing... should he be allowed? Or should we also take into account the suffering of the victim?
I actually find the term "good person" a bit... i don't know. I don't like it. The way I position myself in the world, I'm not a deontologist, I think a lot of these things are subjective. Consistence is important to me and I try to be consistent; we all have failings but I think admitting that we are flawed is the first step. And personally, I believe eating meat is an ethical failing as there are many others. People lie and cheat all the time, it doesn't necessarily make them bad. People hurt others in the pursuit of pleasure, it doesn't mean they are bad. I agree with you when you talk about the importance of willingness to correct after self reflection.
Ultimately my point is that eating meat is actually a really challenging philosophical problem that I don't think we really take it as seriously as we should, because it's much easier to ignore the problem than face the reality of our actions and think of the consequences that course correcting them might have on our lives and societies as a whole. I view our meat eating an addiction at the societal level, and I think in order to get to a healthy consumption (which might mean little or none) we would need to treat the issue the same way we treat addiction problems on communities. That's why to me acknowledging that we have a problem is such an important first step. I've realised now in this thread that many people don't think we even have a problem at all, that's a bit of a surprise for me.
You don't? Please tell me that you are not advocating reallocating half of all hospital funds to animal shelters in order to equalize the balance between us and domesticated animals.
> It seems you're really hammering on the concept of domestication, but why?
Because it explains the value system. We domesticated animals to eat them. Pigs ate the food scraps we couldn't and we ate them. I'm not sure what is unclear to you about this setup.
> Why is for example a domesticated pig less worthy of living than a domesticated dog, or a domesticated plant or a human?
Everything has life worthy of living. My question to you is why you don't cry over the single celled organism holocaust every time you wash your hands? Are their lives not worthy? We compartmentalize and prioritize -- you do it just as much as I do, you just feel like judging me for being honest about what mine are.
Why would you say something "everything has life worthy of living" why? I actually disagree with this statement. Animals like pigs or dogs or humans are not just living beings, they also have complex mental processes. Did you know pigs are very much aware of deaths in their close families? These are complex animals that feel both physical and emotional pain. I'm sorry you think domestication has turned pigs into walking meat but that's simply not the case. So it's not difficult to justify the ending of lives of bacteria as opposed to pigs, but it is much more difficult to justify the ending of the lives of pigs as opposed to humans.
And I think you really haven't been able to justify your human exceptionalism, instead you simply attack me as if I'm supposed to convince you that this is not the case simply because you "feel" that it's right. And that's my point, you have a dogmatic belief that you're not willing to even challenge.
Obviously I get the instinct of human exceptionalism, but instinct does not make for good reason. Should we allocate half of our hospital resources to animal shelters? I mean, how about we stop eating meat instead? How about we stop the mass consumerism we are trapped in? We don't have to sacrifice the well being of humans to improve the well being of animals. Well, we might have to sacrifice some comfort, because the way we live is simply unsustainable.
I'm confused. You qualify some life as exceptional and other life as not. Because of 'complexity'? How is one thing different from another?
> So it's not difficult to justify the ending of lives of bacteria as opposed to pigs, but it is much more difficult to justify the ending of the lives of pigs as opposed to humans.
According to what? Because they have emotions and care about family? How do you know? You anthropomorphize an animal and use that to justify your stance -- and complain about human centric thinking.
> And I think you really haven't been able to justify your human exceptionalism
I never even attempted to do so. I said it is innate to humans to do that. You just did it without even realizing it by ascribing human qualities to pigs to justify why they should be treated better than other animals.
> instead you simply attack me as if I'm supposed to convince you that this is not the case simply because you "feel" that it's right.
Oh please. I haven't been emotional even a tiny bit here and I haven't attacked anyone. You feel attacked, but if you re-read this entire conversation what is being attacked is a push to see that there is no absolute moral decision one can make about animal life and food without contradiction on many levels. I happen to pick the dubious morality accepted by the vast vast majority of human society throughout recorded history and I acknowledge that it is flawed, and I have no qualms picking my own species comfort over those lower in the food chain which have been adapted by us for utilitarian purpose.
> Obviously I get the instinct of human exceptionalism, but instinct does not make for good reason.
No, but it doesn't have to, because you can't escape it. It is innate.
Look, I don't agree with industrially processing animal life to be a mass commodity but I can't separate 'killing a whole lot of them at once centrally' with 'killing a few in disparate locations'. But I will defend eating meat against vague philosophical word salads that do nothing but claim the same thing I am but with a different set of qualifications for what is and is not worthy of our empathy for reasons just as dubious as mine. At least I admit it.
Most major religions for starts. Probably not the answer you were looking for, nor one that sits well with you, but it is nevertheless the truth.
Perhaps you, like myself, are an atheist. Well it turns out that most atheists eat meat too. So the evidence points towards industrial slaughter being ethical in most secular ethical frameworks as well.
inb4 "it's not a real ethical framework if I disagree with it."
The dilemma being that despite the harm caused, our species developed to eat animal products, and it's difficult to fully replace that.
Yet that's not really the case, we eat a lot of meat. And red meat as well which really is not necessary in our diets. I believe trying to argue from a naturalist perspective is rather dishonest in that it's by no means the real reason why people consume meat. People consume meat the way they do because it's a cultural expectation as well as a highly pleasurable act for most.
So really, to me, the dilemma has much more to do with how much pleasure are we willing to give up as a society and I really don't think that goes very far. I mean, this debate has also ramifications when it comes to the climate; how much are we willing to give up in comfort and pleasure to curtail the ecological disaster we are causing? The answer: not much really.
In my opinion these are really failings of our political systems, so in other words, the system that's supposed to help us make decisions for our society as a whole. I'm pretty sure most people would agree that maybe in a reasonable amount of time we'd like to see changes to our diets, it's an interesting discussion to have and there could be long term plans to achieve it that could be very much realistic... but our political system simply does not allow the for the discussion to be had in the first place.
It's possible as a human to ingest from non animal sources all the essential nutrients, but there's HUGE misdirection in at least american commerce about how to do so. For instance, labels talk about grams of protein, which is inadequate: you could be ingesting a ton of a subset of amino acids in protein, and entirely deficient in an essential amino acid.
It seems that eating animals was a heuristic that supplies essential amino acids and vitamins.
I worked in immunotherapeutics and gave cancer to ~25 mice. I can't say it helped progress the field much, and I still feel bad. Cannot imagine what it's like to give cancer to a dog.
and it was (long story short) greed, not science. just appalling.
Anyway, pet owners aren't lining up to volunteer their pets for experimental treatments, so researching dog cancer on random sick dogs isn't a great model either.
You have to accept that in the real world a dog's life is objectively worth less to humans than a human life.
If that were not true, then it would be generally accepted that saving a dog would take priority over a child, whereas the reverse is true.
I'm not advocating for mistreating dogs, I'm advocating for distinguishing between how we would like the world to be and how the world really is.
> What would a dog answer
To me it's interesting that they chose to give a dog the ability to answer. Certainly the ability to speak like a human would factor in 'how much like humans they are'. It's a way of humanizing the dog, which introduces bias, making the dog more human than it really is.
There is no need to pretend dogs are almost people to justify treating them well.
Your mention of speaking just reminded me of a thought I'd had, regarding how we measure where animals' sit on the human-ness scale. I think that metric has a lot of biases in how we weight its constituent factors. I.e. how well an animal can communicate with us - which might be quite orthogonal to its intelligence. (For example an octopus)
Anyway, different sorts of things having different values is why so many people are concerned about powerful non-human entities with inhuman motivations (AIs generally, and corporations particularly.) It's also the reason people are afraid of hungry bears (the bear cares more about itself than you.)
The value judgement could simply come from the fact that we need to preserve our own species, and if we need to sacrifice some small percentage of dogs to do so, than this is perfectly reasonable. We can still exhibit empathy by accepting that this situation is not ideal and striving to reduce that percentage down to 0, maybe by inventing substitutes.
As for the machines example, I would expect the machines to place higher value on their own life than on human life, precisely because they would be objectively superior, which is why I would not let machines exist without any restrictions, even if the machines would be a more useful dominant species.
Machines experience no pleasure or pain and thus there is zero utility gained/lost by destroying them. Dogs and humans do; it's bad to kill or torture them.
Throwing a dog in front of a train (or killing/torturing it for research) to save a child depends on how likely it is that it will work, and how many QALYs the dog and child have left.
A stranger's life is also worth less than my daughter's life. A million strangers?
If I had to press a button to choose between my daughter or all the strangers on HN and their dogs, I would press it and wouldn't even blink.
If it were a stranger's daughter, though, I'd probably ask some questions about the daughter, and if I can't determine that there's something about her that would be worth a million strangers, she would have the same value as an average stranger, so I would opt to save a million strangers.
If I had to choose between a stranger and all dogs on Earth, I would ask some questions about the human, and, absent any red flags, I would choose the human, simply out of the need to preserve my own species, even if I think there's more than enough of us and having dogs around would probably make a lot of people's life better than that one person.
Of course, humans are an ecological disaster too, but a single human out of 8B is a drop in the ocean, and we're not comparing 1 human to 1 dog.
And honestly, I don't see how dogs make anyone's life "easier": they require more care and attention than a toddler, and it never stops until they die. People I know with dogs basically never travel or take any kind of vacation, because they can never leave their dog alone for more than ~8 hours at a time. Any kind of pet is truly a luxury, but dogs require a level of commitment and caretaking well above and beyond almost any other.
Part of the beauty of living with nonhumans is the invigoration of sharing understanding and cooperation across species.
I think this is normally called "A dog is a man's best friend." or something similar.
I suspect it holds across millenia because that cross species relation is at times more dependable and communicative than individuals of the same species often are capable of, and that's not sarcasm, I mean it's where that phrase comes from. And i say that as someone not averse to humans collaborating, just as someone who lives among many species.
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/the-truth-about-cats-and-...
>Part of the beauty of living with nonhumans is the invigoration of sharing understanding and cooperation across species.
I don't see this with dogs at all. People with dogs are basically slaves to the dogs; their entire life revolves around the dog. It's absolutely no different than having a small toddler, except that you can bring toddlers with you places. I don't see how it's healthy or productive to not be allowed to leave your home for more than 6 hours because your dog will destroy stuff or pee or poop if you're gone too long, you can never go on a vacation, everything in your daily life has to be planned around the dog. How this ever got normalized, I have no idea, but it wasn't like this a generation ago.
Dogs may be a hard no for someone, and yes for someone else. It's kinda arbitrary.
I think I know what you mean, but the impression was that the tests were for treatments in dogs, perhaps the presumption being they'd work in humans, but that was not clear.
> Is it so outrageous to say that a dog's life has less value than a human's?
The commenter I replied to said "yes"
So the commenter is saying that yes, it is outrageous to say that a dog's life has less value than a human's.
So that implies that it is outrageous to say that because a dog's life does not have less value than a human life. It has equal or greater value. I'm going to assume that the commenter means equal value.
So if a dog's life is equal in value to a humans, it follows we should dedicate as many resources to dog health as human health.
Is any of the above flawed?
> nor was any mention of values made.
We're talking about the relative value of human life vs dog here. The term 'value' has literally been mentioned. Values by definition are what we believe to be valuable. By answering "yes" to the question, the commenter has revealed some of their values as it relates to dog vs. human life.
https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2019/09/04/veterina...
Perhaps something about caring for animals attracts depressed or possibly suicidal people in the first place.
Just an anecdote, but within 1 month in 2018, the lady I adopted my dog from(Stacey Radin), my dog walker, and a lady who ran a horse rescue in my hometown all committed suicide(none knew each other). I don't think I know anyone else directly who has committed suicide, and they all worked with animals.
> Several studies have identified a link between suicide and occupation (1), including the healthcare professions and our own profession. The rate of suicide in the veterinary profession has been pegged as close to twice that of the dental profession, more than twice that of the medical profession (2), and 4 times the rate in the general population (3).
Firearm owners have higher suicide rates just because they have a reliable means at hand. Vets have euthanasia drugs, dentists have gas, doctors have various drugs. Is that taken into account?
--
https://digitaleditions.walsworth.com/publication/?i=758312&...
> Suicide rates among dentists and a perceived elevated risk for suicide have been debated in academic publications worldwide for decades.
> A 2011 study of the Danish population published in the November 2011 issue of the Journal of Affective Disorders found that dentists had higher age and gender-adjusted rate ratios for suicide and risk for suicide compared with the general population. It reports that dentists held the highest suicide rate at 7.18 percent for men and women combined, and that these suicides rates are much higher than the national average. The national average for men and women was reported as 0.42 percent. Male dentists held the highest suicide rate at 8.02 percent. Female dentists held the fourth highest suicide rate at 5.28 percent.
> In 2017, the British Dental Association found that 17.6% of the dentists they surveyed have seriously considered committing suicide.
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Dentists and Suicide: A Look at the Numbers - https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health/dentists-and-suicid...
> The Center for Disease Control’s most recent report in 2016 on “Suicide Rates by Industry and Occupation” does not list dentists separately, but rather groups them in with other healthcare workers, ranking eleventh. And yet, despite the lack of any hard evidence, the myth regarding dentists being the number one suicide occupation stubbornly persists, casting a negative light on the profession. Not only can this affect the well-being of practitioners, it can also negatively influence perceptions by patients and by students considering dentistry as a prospective career.
Imagine you're a human doctor, except your patients are mute and can't give consent, and they're brought to you in a sorry state for emergency care by people who are frequently hostile and grossly neglectful to your patients. To that pile of daily woes, add significant student debt, chronic under-staffing issues, and increasing PE ownership.
It's a really tough industry, almost everything is stacked against them. [I've worked in a pet-care-adjacent space for a few years].
It seems like modeling clinical conferences that discuss patient cases that have been particularly upsetting to staff could be a model for animal care staff as well. Something like a monthly meeting where animal care staff and research staff could decompress and discuss the importance of the research that is being conducted while acknowledging the unique emotional toll of working with animals.
It's because humans have moral and ethnical frameworks. Despite a document drafting XYZ is okay because "its for science" it still is wrong in the sense you are sacrificing something with a memory, sadness, happiness, etc for a possible "greater good". Especially for dogs, an animal deeply engrained and coevolved with humans, I cannot imagine the amount of cognitive dissonance, or more likely, sociopathy that would be required to engage in such experiments.
We trivialize the fact it's unethical to experiment on humans. I am not a treehugger or anything but to suggest talk therapy will help solve a very real moral and ethical problem...well I'm not sure you understand. Veterinarians have an extremely high suicide rate for a reason. Moreover, I will never forget the callousness of the veterinarian who suggested I put my family dog down for something that wasn't immediately fatal. It's only a small step from that asshole to these assholes and that step is complete transcendence into pathological psychopathy. We simply sometimes benefit from these psychopaths gassing dogs and pigs. It does not imply such a thing is either morally or ethically correct and no amount of "decompressing" will fix it. It just is what it is and some people have developed the pathological brain wiring to allow themselves to do it.
We're predators. We consume other animals. The fact we have found other ways to consume them doesn't make for a moral conundrum.
Indeed, true to the empathic nature of a social species, we even go out of our way to minimize the suffering of our prey.
Do you think the bear does that, as it eats its pray alive? Or the animals that swallow whole & alive, and kill during digestion only? Or parasitic wasps?
You can be as self indulgent and narcissistic as you want, but if you see a loved one painfully dying of a disease that 10 years of no-holds-barred (FDA-unencumbered) medical research could have have prevented, we'll see how quickly your narcissist "think of the animals" self-indulgence will be replaced by "why are authorities letting this happen" self-indulgence.
Virtue comes from doing what is painful but must be done, not indulging in your high horse like a child who's yet to understand the world.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-38906351 This is where the true outrage should be pointed at.
And those who want to abuse animals can do so legally, by live feeding it to their snake or lizard. It just makes my blood boil in anger.
Because we have no alternative for research, and because other animals are cruel with each other, then it absolves us of compassion? By the same token, there are vicious criminals that are unable to control their base instincts so we should all be viciously killing others whenever we feel justified? That’s how psychopaths and wild animals do it after all.
We don’t have to kill animals and make them suffer like we do currently to raise and eat them. We have the knowledge and technology to thrive on a plant based diet.
Research is a very different thing unfortunately. I very much hope we’ll develop theoretical and computer models to avoid the need for research on animals altogether because this is such a cruel and inhumane thing. But right now, there is no alternative unlike any other situation where we use animals historically (clothing, food).
There were something like 3,000 dogs... all in one building... all penned up from birth.
And upon hearing about the 3,000 dogs, I was like, "Can I see them?"
So she snuck me in.
And they were all bred to have some disorder, I don't remember what now, but like the article said... it was fatal.
And we got to the lab at like 9 PM and nobody else was there.
The dogs were all so happy to see us. God they seemed lonely. They were kept in these little like 10x14 pens, 2-3 dogs per pen. Some dogs were in cages.
But like... they were just dogs. Y'know? Most were just happy and looking to be pet, and it was overwhelming to be there.
I got to give some treats.
One of the pens had a dead dog in it, and my friend agonized over dealing with it or waiting until her shift officially started -- she didn't want to leave the dead dog in the pen, and she didn't want people to know she was sneaking her friends in to play with the dogs. So she decided to deal with the dog, and just tell her supervisor she came back for her wallet or something.
Anyway, for a kid 2,500 miles away from home... who missed his dogs... it was really nice to have an hour to play with puppies and young dogs.
As we were leaving she said that most of the dogs were euthanized at the 6-month mark to check for heart defects, or heart issues. Even the healthy dogs.
Fuck it was devastating to hear that.
I'm sure there's a reason and I'm sure we benefit somehow... and a dog who has never seen the sun, and will never see the sun, probably doesn't know what all they are missing... but they have to know, right? Like every living thing has to know they weren't made to sit in a little pen waiting to die.
I don't know, just felt like they should be outside, playing in a field, all that stuff... being mentally challenged and taught how to fetch and instead... they were bred just so their hearts would fail, or so they could be killed and dissected to see why their heart didn't fail.
Most people at the school didn't even know there was a dog lab like that on campus.
Easier not to think about this stuff.
Yeah, sure, lad. This is not how it works in the real life.
> a dog who has never seen the sun, and will never see the sun
Why? there is not a sun in your planet?
There is a fair chance that when this dogs are walked in the streets or the university gardens by its caretakers will be able to see the sun, sniff the sun and even to pee in the sun
Probably because the grants require it, the bioethics committee will watch for it, and the laws regulate it [1]. So if there is a minimum possibility of walking the dogs or enrich their lives, will be used extensively.
[1] (See for example: Council of Europe – European Convention for the Protection of Vertebrate Animals used for Experimental and other Scientific Purposes (ETS No. 123). Strasbourg 1986).
Lets don't be so dumb as to ignore that this is a tightly, strictly, closely regulated field
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And also because the investment in money and time is too expensive that nobody wants the risk to neglect the animals and lose it. Not when your entire career, income and wellbeing of your partner and children depends on this animals. And because they are humans of course and like to interact with their lab animals.
Animals that will be used later in extremely critical experiments that could cure horrible diseases forever in both humans --and pets--. Don't forget that. If a medicine for humans is tested in dogs, will be developed for humans but also for dogs at the same time, so, yes there is a sacrifice, but also a big reward for every dog in the planet.
But this will not be discussed because this kind of articles hallucinating hells of crying mice and psycho/broken-hearted lab people, have been written with two obvious purposes: 1) luring naive donors and part them from their money and 2) discourage young adults to work in a field that is critical if we really want --to reduce-- animal and human suffering.
And this is a criminal move, and should be ashamed and mocked every single time.
I like the term "LinkedIn Broetry" though... instantly knew what you meant. Ha.
(2) It was a good story and a relevant comment.
No reason to bring gender into this discussion, why not criticize/discuss the comment itself.
On the other hand, "put it to sleep" is definitely such an obfuscation.
I dislike unnecessary suffering and some of it does sound very unnecessary. I can give some level of dispensation for necessary pain, but even then it should be a good reason ( and it seems sometimes the reasons are in the 'not great' category ).
All that said, what are the options here with regards to research animals?
1. We stop research on all animals 2. We don't stop 3. We research even more 4. We adjust it to some more acceptable status quo
Personally, I have a recent opinion that may jar some as I am more and more leaning towards #1. I think what eventually got me was dog cloning services in US.
What will follow is a move a different type of testing ( and hopefully more humane ): human testing.
It will come with its own set of issues, but, at least, subjects will be able to consent.
The researcher who was the most drained from her work was doing work that was entirely focused on the animals she works with. Veterinary schools use research animals as well.
The way to justify animal testing is to say, "Ok, we can make these animals suffer for 50 years... or we can make humanity continue to suffer or another 250 in order to better understand this and how the disease grows and evolves... what's worse?"
But... that's the only way I can think to justify it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om...
IMM, animals suffering. Capable humans can speak. "Yeah doc, the lump got bigger, feels like my eyes are about to burst".
Unlike animals who are mute apart from squealing which is the only sign for bad. Whom are mainly kept in-humane conditions, no consensual agreement. Does a Monkey get kept in paradise during the testing runs? Elon's brainchip-chimps research shows just how poorly treated they were.
Lack of lawful-rights, regulations, corrupted-inspections. The odds are stacked against animals; at least us, humans, can reach out if they were being mistreated. I fail to see any justification for animal testing.
It is a valid point, that it may only take twenty-five years on animals, and now we have a pseudo-cure for X. Testing still has to be done on humans, if that fails? Well back to the drawing board with more animal suffering for another twenty-five. So why not just skip straight to humans?
If it takes 250 years, that's 250 years more research on the species it's trying to cure with an high percentage of a foreseeable cure.
I recall a NYT article recently titled something along the lines "you'll forget most of the Covid pandemic and that's a good thing" - and as angry as that title made me I know its right - Solzhenitsyn talked about the memory of the Gulag years fading away from him, getting fat and complacent, turning back to old things - so even if such great trauma is lost in time I have no doubt most people just forget about how pigs are slaughtered in a week or two.
I almost think its almost by evolutionary design, to live otherwise and carry and accumulating all that weight over the course of a life time is very hard. The alternative is to turn into a stone and abandon your humanity altogether. I don't mean to be cynical, it's just an observation.
Bitterness aside, I feel for these animals and for the people trying to make their short lives better.
Big-time cognitive dissonance there.
Behavioral problems, etc make reproducibility harder.
When we can overcome those problems, like with cultured cells, most prefer human cell lines.
But the intention is to have a "model" rather than the full thing.
And why is that a problem? More research, more study material. In the two generations you'll have a cure+extra compared to a single dedicated animal study, that may not even work on humans. Loosely speaking.
Rat: easy for you to say.
Also, this was the plot of Shinsekai Yori.
Phase 1 trials are to test safety and possibly design input for the next (phase 2) trial. In particular in oncology, there is no expectation that a patient in phase 1 will even potentially benefit from an experimental drug but there will likely be (detrimental) side effects in the high-dose groups at which point we back off.
So let's acknowledge that many of the (more modern) drugs we take are also a result of fairly heroic consent from human patient volunteers without any chance of personal gain.
In the UK, all abattoirs have to have a vet in attendance when they are slaughtering animals. I always thought finding that your job as a vet must feel like a weird career turn. You become a vet to help sick animals and now you're helping kill healthy ones.
The goal isn’t just to get someone to say “okay”; the point is to make sure they’re doing so freely and with a complete understanding of the possible outcomes.
Where is the circle?
> "Do prisoners consent to being imprisoned?" -> "No, because they're prisoners."
Is that circular reasoning too? Or is that simply the flat truth, whether you like it or not?
Where you go wrong is in assuming that seeking the consent of animals is a universal value that everybody else shares with you. But that is not true. The answer to "do animals consent to this" is "No, and so what?" The question you pose is only compelling to people who already share your values. To somebody who doesn't share your values, your argument is easily addressed and dismissed. The animals being eaten don't consent, and we don't care because they're animals.