Living with Lab Mice

"Exploiting," rather than "exploring," I think perhaps, and to the extent you did not mean that first line as a sarcasm, I would say we have made much albeit faltering progress in recent years. Beyond that I agree with you wholeheartedly.

I did not need to read the article to know something about how laboratory animals behave. As a child I regularly had the company of controls whom my mother opted to smuggle home once their experiments had concluded - rather than, as was officially required in the laboratory technician role from which she has long since retired, euthanize them.

I suppose if the method required for same were not precisely enough specified, we might argue that "safely and peacefully lived out their allotted span of days" still qualifies as the eponymous or nominal "good death." Mama will be 71 this year but has not lost her wits. Would you like me to text and ask if she remembers whether she broke that rule or only bent it?

I certainly will read the article properly, of course. I just haven't yet made the time. But I will note, since you bring it up, that the implicit distinction given there between behaviorist and ethologist as two different kinds of bad is indeed just the sort of distinction a philosopher might draw; that is, valid, nuanced, interesting, and not at all guaranteed to be remotely sound. The prototypical modern ethologist is Jane Goodall, and the one whose work I've myself most closely and productively studied is Mary Jane West-Eberhard.