Rats Dream About the Places They Want to Explore

The mechanism is the same, but the effect is very different. Other animals do not exhibit the anxiety about expecting or experiencing pain that humans do. While that does not justify putting animals in unnecessary pain, it does mean we should be careful not to anthropomorphize our reactions to pain (or anything else, for that matter) onto animals.

To be fair, I'm at least consistent in that I think human experimentation is prudent and should be done, precisely because I think it's unethical to stall some of the research questions it would answer.

Of course, we actually /do/ human experimentation, including experimentation we're not sure will work or which is not directly consented to by the human, moderated by the utility we get out of it and the risk to the human.

> But still, it's an issue of ends justifying the means.

What else is there to justify (or condemn) them?

We are but passing minds, waves cresting and breaking in a sea of chemicals. I view it as a duty to try and see as many healthy and happy minds as I can, and to be a net increase on that.

There simply is no reality except the one here, and our net impact on that all that matters. There's no cosmic tally after about how good you meant to be.

So while it would break my heart to, I would push down the plunger to kill everyone one of my pet rats so I didn't have to see so many skeletal faces in the children's cancer ward anymore.

> I don't know if humans have the right to effectively (metaphorically) cannibalize other species in order to improve our own, just because we're more intelligent.

At the end of the day, my views are really the emotional, monsterous ones: I simply value human lives at over a million rats to a human, so I'm willing to kill billions of them a year on the alter of saving those children. Once I have that valuation, the rest is pretty easy deductions about what allows the advance of research in the biochemistry.

So I'm curious: do you not regard the people who die through your inaction to be your fault? and if they are your fault, how many human children is a rat worth?

Unfortunately with basic science it's not so easy as saying: research that eventually benefits people is OK, but everything else is not worth it. To look at this particular study: they are recording from cells in the hippocampus, an area that experiences atrophy and degeneration in both schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease. There is a strong homology between rat and human biology in this area: anatomically, physiologically, and even in disease states.

If you want to say that animal experimentation is never worth it, then you have to be willing to forgo whatever future benefits to humankind might accrue from this research, and you have to be comfortable making this decision for everyone else who might benefit. Ethically, you should probably also forgo any medical treatment that was developed on the backs of animal research. (Though you will still benefit from the eradication of many diseases and herd immunity to others).

In terms of the scale and degree of suffering, and of ethics, I think there is much more clear-cut ground to be won in encouraging people not to breed and kill animals for food or sport, and in protecting wild animal habitat from ecological degradation.