Comment by Fomite | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fomite | Hacker News Reader

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It's not as grim as you're considering. One of the things you want is people who know what they're doing taking care of the animals in question.

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.

The emotional toll of dispatching lots of small animals, even if you are not bonded with them, is real.

I never said it wasn't - I know people who work in those facilities, and it takes a massive emotional toll. I'm just suggesting that the scientists who don't deal with their own animals aren't doing it because they're callous - it's because we need people who will do it right, and with minimal suffering to the animal.

> scientists who don't deal with their own animals aren't doing it because they're callous

Much like meat eaters who avoid slaughterhouses...

Most people "avoid slaughterhouses" in the same way that most people "avoid vegetable canneries". Which is to say that people don't visit these sort of facilities because most people don't have any business to do at one, nor do they think that visiting a food processing plant is a worthwhile use of their time.

Incidentally, I used to work in a bean canning plant. No random members of the public ever visited us.

The point is that people don’t want to see the horror that goes into their animal based diet, not that the slaughterhouse is hard to get to.

The point is that people don't visit food processing plants regardless of what kind of food is being processed, not because they're scared of canned beans or seeing where meat comes from.

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 beans were not crying loud enough, obviously.

I think there's a worthwhile distinction between meat eaters and scientists.

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.

I respectfully disagree.

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.

Porcelain people that shatters at the minimum problem crying rivers of drama are not prepared to do this kind of work for sure. They should be selling cosmetics, playing sad piano tunes or picking strawberries instead. The clichés described here shouldn't be doing this kind of job or trying to find a cure for lethal diseases.

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.

The contempt some of y'all have for the range of normal human experience and expression is sickening-to-alarming sometimes god damn.

Said by the same people advocating for testing diseases in people jailed, that is not a sickening idea at all.

I don't understand, are you saying the person you're responding to is advocating for testing diseases on people in jail? Because from the outside it looks like you're adding a random characterization to someone else's unrelated argument in order to more easily dismiss them.

What? I honestly have no idea what you are trying to say here.

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