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Comment by quasque | Hacker News Reader

Every species favours its own - humans are not special in that regard.

Only humans perform experiments on other species that we would regard as torture if they were done to us. We argue that it's for the greater good, of course, but the ease and speed with which we rush to accept that is suspicious; in other areas of life we would regard such arguments as obvious self-serving spin. It's not hard to imagine that future generations will look back on many of these experiments with the same moral horror that we have toward some of the past.

I had this feeling when watching the Capuchin monkey fairness experiment in Frans de Waal's TED talk. From an ordinary point of view, it's cute and charming. You laugh along with the audience; the monkeys are funny. You go away with a heartwarming feeling that you've learned something about primate (and thus human) nature. But if the veil drops and you look at it more immediately, the video can also seem horrific. At least it struck me that way. That and other things have got me wondering whether there's something wrong with a science that excludes empathy as a component of knowledge.

> Only humans perform experiments on other species that we would regard as torture.

Because only humans are capable to, do you seriously think overwhelming cognitive advantage would be used any different if we had different traits? If our heads were shaped like the ones of mice? Or if we had 4 stomachs like the cows? And this selfishness and disregard for other animals well being is what made humans growth so quickly and one of the main reasons you and me exist.

The greater good argument should not be dismissed so readily. All of modern biomedicine is laid upon the foundations of animal experimentation - the vast majority of medicines we take for granted today, and the knowledge base they are derived from, would not exist without it. It's a very real dichotomy between human and animal suffering.

I seem to recall, bottlenose dolphins have been known to attack and kill spinner dolphins for "fun" (i.e. they don't eat the dolphin afterwards). Cats play with mice before finally killing them. That's, in my mind, as close to an "experiment" as you get in nature. Don't assume humans are the worst animals out there: while we have our horrible streaks, if we gave our mental capacity over to other animals (say, chimpanzees), the world would be no prettier. At least we've mostly eliminated the murder of our rivals' children so that we can impregnate the mother, unlike our closest genetic relative.

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