This seems very cruel, even in the face of progress. The price that animals pay for human survival is unimaginable.
”The mice were anesthetized for 5 min using 4% isoflurane in a 70:30 mixture of air:oxygen”
The regulations around animal testing are strict. You need to reduce all suffering to the maximum extebt possible.
You can apply for research where suffering occurs, if justified by the research (say anesthetic or analgesics interfere) but good luck getting it approved. You’ll be told “come back with a better approach”.
Would you volunteer to be anaesthetised and then have your head bashed in multiple times?
No? Why should animals.
I don’t understand the issue.
We should try to minimize the pain and suffering of these test subjects, in a few decades I am sure we will have better alternatives…
This seems to be self evident to you. Can you explain why this is true?
Not to say animals are more important than humans but I imagine for most people it'd depend on the scale. Same reason most people are uncomfortable with the suffering of millions of animals for the sake of cosmetics.
We're only here today because animals have given us the resources to survive. From cavemen hunting for meat to bees, insects pollinating plants.
The only resource we can provide is limited breast milk, sperm and meat. But human meat is deemed socially unacceptable, sperm only exists within biological males and the biological women has a limited timespan in their life where only if the conditions are right they lactate. So no, we have no importance.
Without any feasible resources that the homo sapien race can provide, of which could provide cultivation, that in return makes humans unimportant. QED
No other plant or animal is important either. Nature doesn't give a shit about any of us. The ability to actually care about abstract concepts like the suffering of others is a rare trait in the animal kingdom. Humans have it. Maybe some primates and cetaceans have it. Otherwise animals are quite content to rip each other apart in the most cruel ways possible for food. I assure you, a lion does not lose any sleep over the suffering of the gazelle.
This alone makes humans a little special, no?
> Humans are not important, we are a fault to this world.
> This alone makes human a little special, no?
No, not really. We build militant armies only to send them off to fight so we can cause brutality to the same race for all but nothing other than evil and greed.
At least animals are mauling in for survival. You could say power too but at least they eat the remains.
Philosophy is an invention of humans. Laws are an invention of humans. ETHICS are an invention of humans. Nature thinks our laughable attempts at "being ethical" are adorable. Nature is perfectly happy for us to brutally torture each other.
There is no particularly good objective reason for me to value my neighbours life more than a fish.
However I choose to be an unabashed specieist and value any individual human life above any individual other life.
Edit: or do you see cross-species minimization of pain as an objective objective (ha)? Or maximization of pleasure?
There is no "objective" answer to ethics.
But yes, if we want to base it on empathy, it would mean XY... so many philosophical arguments have been made about this. But it stands there is no "objective" ethics, at least to my knowledge.
Without even involving animals, there's not even a definite way how to answer the trolley problem without violating my subjective ethical values.
Human life as an ulterior value seems to be the best bet for explaining rational ethics.
Mice do not extend reciprocity. They will not chase your murderer down, or avoid injury to you.
If you're searching for more than that, you've turned it into a religion. This is a practical matter.
It's unlikely that you have developmental issues that makes this impossible for you to understand intuitively. I suspect that you were miseducated.
I can name lots of animals that scream when you step on them. Is this related to the thread?
If I were to do the same to a human that would be a big problem.
Why is it like this? I don't know but that's just the way it is. Don't try to rationalize it, it's not supposed to be rational. Our evolutionary quirks and moral instincts are the product of biological evolution not rational thought.
It's not rational, but it is self evident, to everyone. Including you. Your appeal is more of a request to ask for the rationality behind it and hoping that when people see how irrational it is they will side with you.
People aren't rational. There beliefs are based off of instinctual desires and they construct scaffolds of rational logic around their preconceived beliefs.
For example: how do you justify the slaughter and killing of all the plants that cows rip through without a second thought? Are plants less important then animals? It's mind blowing how many plants are literally executed every time those cows chew.
This what I do is a service to justice. I eat the flesh of slaughtered cows to punish plant killers. I balance the scales of justice every time I devour a steak.
This same logic justifies cannibalism of all vegetarians too but I'm unwilling to eat vegans. You'll have to get back to me on that. It takes time to fully rationalize all my instinctual behaviors.
Only thing I have to say is
> People aren't rational. ~~There~~ Their beliefs are based off of instinctual desires and they construct scaffolds of rational logic around their preconceived beliefs.
A huge pet peeve of mine is when people tell me what I believe. Believe what you want, but I absolutely anchor my beliefs in my rational understanding. Sometimes I don't have a rational understanding, and no belief on the matter (not having an opinion is actually possible). That's why I asked.
The profoundly unaware speciesism and selfishness in this comment is exactly why there is so much suffering and pain in this world.
I'm minimally interested in reducing the level of human pain that exists in the world. I'm absolutely uninterested in reducing the level of non-human pain in the world unless there are practical benefits for that effort.
I don't even know what "suffering" means. Is "suffering" pain, just a synonym? If so, why say "suffering and pain"? Is it some sort of fallacy to try to add emotional weight to your statement? Is suffering distinct from pain? Can you measure suffering? Detect it with some instrument? Do you even have a definition for suffering?
"Suffering" is as mystical and meaningless as when the religious talk about souls. When people use that word, I suspect very strongly that they're incapable of consistently remaining rational.
If you want to ‘have it all,’ we’ll need to invest heavily in creating more advanced biomedical research models. This requires strong societal and political willpower.
This is a complex, nuanced topic, and yes, you're right, it is cruel to the mice (although, if you read the paper, they took steps to _minimize_ the mouse's suffering -- the mice were anaesthetized during the concussion, and they were euthanized after the experiment). In order to perform an experiment in animals in a research setting, you have you propose your experiment to a ~5-person committee called an IACUC (every institution doing research on invertebrates has to have one), and they review your experiment to ensure that it meets their standards of being ethical, humane, and of sound experimental design.
Because of this system, we are able to work with animal models (often mice) that teach us a lot about how our own body works, how proposed drugs could be used to treat illnesses and injuries. We do this because we really don't have a better system of learning about bodies.
We do have many _worse_ systems of learning about bodies. Centuries of experiments (many in recent memory) of experiments on humans. People experimenting with convicts, impoverished people, and people who someone decided are sub-human and are therefore ok to experiment on. That's not to say that it's ok to cause suffering to animals because we also caused suffering to humans. I bring it up because I actually derive some hope from it, that we are more aware of suffering and take more steps to reduce the suffering we cause in pursuit of knowledge. I sincerely hope that that trend will continue.
In my day job, I'm a wildlife photographer. I spend a lot of time watching animals. I see animals kill and eat eachother. I see animals get injured and sick, I see many animals die prolonged, painful deaths. Causing animal suffering is not an exclusively human domain -- much of this also happens right next to our houses, just out of our sight or awareness. I guarantee, wherever you live, that many animals are killed and eaten in your house every day, mostly without your knowledge. Of course, we cause our share of that suffering, as well, more through neglect than intent. I see countless animals dying, entangled in plastic or with guts full of plastic chunks. I see tens of thousands of fish in my city's rivers impaired or dying from chemicals in my city's runoff. I watch otters and bald eagles happily eat those animals -- they're easy to catch, after all. It's harder to be angry at the people who caused this suffering, because, well, we don't know who they are, and often _they_ don't know who they are. They just chucked a plastic bag into the road, or made a mistake on a jobsite, or were just passive participants in a very flawed system.
Sometimes, we cause that suffering through intent. Victor, the mousetrap company, has sold over a billion mousetraps, which we use because we find mice in our homes and cities to be a nuisance, or gross, or whatever the imagined offense is. Take a walk through the pest control aisle at your local big box and take a moment to imagine the unmitigated suffering that each of those chemicals cause when it reaches its intended, or unintended, target.
I also volunteer in a wildlife rehab in my state -- whenever a wild animal is found injured, it ends up in this particular building (I live in a small state). Each year, we get thousands of animals, often unintentionally but painfully injured by people. Possums that get into the rat poison and show up bleeding from their face and hands. Waterfowl that show up with lead poisoning from eating lost fishing weights. More animals hit by cars than I can count. Some animals are intentionally injured by people -- lots of bloody birds peppered with bullets, often airsoft or other non-lethal bullets that someone just shot because they were bored. We treat these animals. Many get better, many don't. We euthanize the animals that don't using the same method the scientists use in this paper -- isoflurane to anaesthetize and a second method to ensure that the animal has died painlessly. I feel fine about this practice -- the goal of a rehab is to reduce harm in the wild population and to return healthy animals to the wild. Not all injured animals get better, and the cold calculation is that it's kinder to kill the animal humanely and painlessly than to keep it alive in a state of suffering and stress.
My point is, the scale of animal suffering right outside your door is vast. It's a noble effort to want to reduce that amount of suffering. However, _most_ of the suffering that's around us in cities is pointless, un-intended suffering, and nobody gains anything from it -- the mouse in the glue trap or the fish stuck in a plastic bag. It's true that these scientists are causing animal suffering, but it's also true that there is a point to it. They are doing these experiments to understand and reduce future suffering, in people as well as animals (basically all the drugs we use in the wildlife rehab, for example, are the exact same drugs we use in human hospitals). The suffering the scientists are causing is a drop in the bucket compared to what is happening each day, unseen, in the square block around your house. It's easy to criticize their work because they are being honest about their methods -- that's part of what being a scientist means -- but in my opinion, if your goal is to reduce animal suffering, you're missing the forest for the trees. Scientists are not the target you're looking for, both in terms of the scale of animals or the magnitude of suffering.
I will say, we have made dramatic improvements in how we understand medicine's effect on the body. Computational chemistry and drug discovery has made giant strides in the past several decades, and that lets us learn by computation what we could previously only learn from animal trials. Perhaps in the future we will be able to better understand complex mechanisms in the body and represent them in software, letting us try some or all of these ideas for fixing problems painlessly, in software, rather than in meatspace. Maybe you'll help create that future.
I'll end with what I feel is a touching piece of art -- in Siberia, there is a statue called the Monument to the Laboratory Mouse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_laboratory_mou...). It stands tribute to the countless mice who gave their lives in pursuit of knowledge, and the statue, if you look at it, is a blend of a mouse and a scientist, recognizing the link between their lives and the knowledge that comes from both those lives. It's a complex piece of art that acknowledges a complex topic, I appreciate it, and maybe you will, too.
I stick to tardigrades, but even then I feel bad if I accidentally kill one or many.
I do take issue with redundant animal testing for trivial things like cosmetics.
The infinite animals, on the other end, made no such genocidal claims. In fact, on the whole, they were about 100% less fond of ethnic cleansing than the hairless apes.
Not satisfied with continuing their perverse murder of the biosphere, the apes regularly turned on their own also, inventing ever-more horrifying methods of doing so. This didn't seem to register on the human who proclaimed such inherent value in human life in the slightest.
In fact, at that current moment multiple genocides were happening, some of them with the full-throated support of that human's voted-for government. Some 40% of citizens and 90+% of politicians and media figures were not only ignoring said mass murder, but in fact paying for it.
You might find this hard to belive, Xanthrax, but these humans are so thoroughly convinced of their superiority by an effect they themselves have identified and named: the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Snark snark baby, Xethrop out.
Compared to that this is tame.
I genuinely think that I would be able to work on a weapons guidance system and even know that it has been used to target a military vehicle without feeling much guilt but performing the kind of work you have quoted on animals would make me stop and think. And just stop. It is not worth the progress. Not worth the credits, the money. Not worth graduating.
https://www.cnet.com/science/i-killed-563-mice-for-science/
I did this myself for many years, and honestly, I believe the world would be a better place if the people designing weapons were exposed to the suffering they cause to the same degree we are.
It definitely messed her up, and she was quite aware of the toll it was taking.
That is pretty sad and disgusting.