> But one of Van Hooser’s biggest pushes is to make the university’s invisible population feel seen. He encourages scientists to name animal workers in meeting posters and publications. He also invites researchers to visit animal facilities (their labs are often in a different part of campus) to explain the importance of their science.
This sounds grim that this is a big push. Scientists not even working on their own animals, leaving technicians to kill them without ever thanking the technician, and the technician never knowing why animals they feed and clean after for years suffer and die.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Becoming too attached will ruin the experiment. Science is done under controlled conditions with as much uncertainty and randomness removed as possible. It's not ideal but we don't have any better options unless you want to do mass sacrifice of animals at scale and use Monte Carlo to derive results.
A lot of the research is entirely unnecessary. We know cadmium is biologically unnecessary. While it is important to quantify safe doses to understand the impact of pollution, getting the precise LD50 of it across various species does little to improve health outcomes.
We already know that dosages above 10 micrograms/kg of body weight is carcinogenic and should be avoided, so establishing where in the 100,000-300,000 microgram/kg range the LD50 resides does nothing for us.
The best LD50 story I've heard was an Agriculture Canada scientist working on biocontrols for pests (think natural pathogenic organisms like fungi or bacteria to control weeds instead of chemical pesticide). Policy and commercialization required an LD50 for a bacterium they were working with. It is nontoxic; the lab calculated the volume of bacterial solution at commercial application strength that it would take for a rat to drown (but obviously did not harm any animals). Sometimes regulatory compliance needs creativity.
Unfortunate that not all labs are able to work similarly, especially as you say for doses where we already know harmful levels and LD50 is a bureaucratic requirement or an easy paper.
I'm already imagining the vapid "400x the LD50" comments that the usual scumbags will be typing when someone somewhere falls into a tank of it and drowns...
>It's not ideal but we don't have any better options
as someone else noted, a lot of this is done as a form of grant-securing, and it's done on a long-term 'maintenance' basis rather than on experiment-basis.
a 'better option' would be the removal of such political and economical games from facilities that are supposed to be doing research; this reduces the suffering and death without much loss to discovery and progress.
the trick being that we, as humans in this world, have little hope of removing extraneous politics from where they do not belong.
but I just care to point out that we're nowhere-near optimal w.r.t. how we operate in the research sector. it can be better.
>and it's done on a long-term 'maintenance' basis rather than on experiment-basis.
The thing is, you can't just start and stop many kinds of animal research. For certain models, there needs to be ongoing maintenance of a breeding population so that that model is available for researchers when they need it for an experiment.
Researchers spend decades making a particular knockout line, and you can't just stick it into a freezer for a rainy day. It has to be maintained or it will no longer exist.
Nobody is getting rich off grants. Then maintenance is a necessity if research gains are to be made on these difficult diseases.
This. The maintenance of many experimental populations is because you can't "spin up and spin down" animals like you can an EC2 instance. Perhaps you need functional colonies. Or specific lines of animals, etc.
Science isn't done via single experiments - it's done by chains of them.
University administrators and the pharma companies that leverage the "research" to push to market marginal improvement drugs would like to have a word.
My mom studied xenotransplantation in non-human primates and pigs. I worked in the veterinary resources department for a couple summers and I can confirm it can be draining. Especially since like most vet resources departments it's in the basement. The best part of the baboons' day is usually when they get to watch The Lion King for enrichment. After a few times they become so familiar with it that they are excited when their favorite scenes are coming up. It's heartbreaking, but at the same time, if we can figure out how to successfully stop organ rejection then we will most likely have cured cancer on the way, and have a much better understanding of how the immune system functions.
It's not that finding a cure to cancer is not important, of course it is, but that doesn't mean the animals need to be treated in deplorable ways. Of course, it's understandable that precautions need to be met and sometimes this means animals need to have reduced contact with other animals and be kept in particular conditions; I worked in immunology for a while so I'm familiar with it.
But I believe the real reason why these animals have to suffer such torture is simply because treating them as best as we could is too expensive and no one wants to pay the cost of animal dignity. No one. So we just justify it saying it's for the greater good.
I mean, it's just a utilitarian position: the potential of millions of lives being improved is worth the suffering of these animals, after all, a human life is much more valuable than an animal life under this frame of reference.
> "if we can figure out how to successfully stop organ rejection then we will most likely have cured cancer on the way"
Genuinely ignorant and layperson curious here ... how are these two things connected? There are so many types of cancer that this sounds bold and almost too ... simple?
In order prevent rejection of the transplant, you give patients immunosuppressive drugs. But part of the immune system's function has always been to clean up any nascent tumerous or pre-cancerous cells. So you are winning on one side and losing on the other. The same co-stimulatory pathways which are getting attention for their effect in waking up the immune system against cancers (PD-L1, CTLA-4, etc) are the pathways which are being studied for the purpose of 'weakening the immune system', or inducing tolerance.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6519766/https://www.cancerhealth.com/article/immune-system-fight-can...
The key will likely include the ability to induce tolerance or an immune response to a specific antigen and possibly of a specific immune subtype, so as not to derange the entire system. Also, the ability to target medications to specific regions of the body so that the entire immune system is not affected.
Sufficiently fine control of the body's immune system such that we can prevent it from attacking a donor organ is likely to also be able to be used to make it attack cells that are reproducing out of control (i.e. cancer).
Xenotransplation is translating animal organs (which are easy to get) into humans. If you can do this then you can aggressively cut out whole organs and replace them with new cancer free organs from animals.
A dear friend who loved animals was a veterinary tech, who'd switched from pet clinic work, to a university-affiliated research lab. She died suddenly, very young, it seems probably due to experience as a vet tech at the lab.
Some of this article sounds familiar, including (near the end) the sneaking off to find somewhere to cry. Even though she was pretty tough.
I don't recall her mentioning troubles related to the animals, other than some physical pain related to some of the repetitive movements handling small cages, and being bothered if other techs didn't do the animal care properly.
She did have problems with a clique of other vet techs bullying her. Though some techs were nice, and the supervising vet and the head of the lab were nice to her, and mostly supportive, other than not managing to fix the nastiness problem.
Going only from one person's experience, and this short article:
1. Can the nature of the lab vet tech work lead to, or select for, nastiness in some people?
2. Do labs let some bad behavior slide, due to the difficulty of hiring (given that the work can be rough, and the pay is poor)?
1) Vet techs have been some of the kindest, most patient people I have met. They are humans, which means some of them are nasty, but between the compassion fatigue, the relatively low pay for the amount of training, etc., I don't think "nastiness" is selected for.
2) Difficulty hiring is one. Difficulty firing is another, if they're at a state university. But there is a national shortage of these types of technicians, and it's not a job that can't get done.
A close family member of mine runs a small animal hospital which routinely hires high school students as cage cleaners and dog walkers. Animal comfort is top priority, and the standard of comfort is very high. For instance, employees are expected to learn how to read and heed animal body language, and to control their own body language and voices to be as non-threatening and friendly as possible.
Very few new hires have any inkling about any of this when they start, so there's a period of a few weeks where they're forgiven a lot. It's a big ask, because a lot of it is new habits, and some of it can be strange new thinking, too. But ultimately the hires who can't adapt are fired.
Consequently a lot of the hires end up studying animal science or veterinary medicine later on. My point is: the nature of the work that comes before the lab tech work can have an impact, too.
Hard to say. We'd probably get better national leaders, but we'd have a big shortage of surgeons so more people would die from medical problems requiring surgery.
I say this purely to foment thought, but think about it, has anyone identified why we even have psychopathy among us? And why many of them are so successful?
Until we do, we're being just as self-indulgent as they are when we get on our high horses with utterances like "psychopaths bad".
Your making an assumption that this is a selected-for trait. I could just as easily substitute many hereditary disorders.
As to why they are successful: cooperation is a more successful strategy than individualism, but cheating is a more successful strategy than cooperation if you can get away with it. Our societies have been largely shaped by cheaters for their benefit so they get away with it a lot, right up until the guillotine comes out.
About the same. Many lawyers and doctors have dark-triad tendencies, which actually aid them. I mean, the original article is about the crippling emotional toll of what many would argue is a necessary evil.
put it this way, the vast majority of people have difficulty reasoning about emotional topics; I bet psychopaths have no limitation of the sort.
my question to you would be, what if we are in an equilibrium? Perhaps just enough psychopaths exist to “GSD“, but not enough to cause too many problems…
I was once in a running group with a guy who worked for Stanford inducing cancers in dogs, to trial and error test various treatments.
Personally I find this unconscionable, as there's an endless supply of all cancers in most species which would benefit from treatments.
It was an hour run, the time he spoke of it, of absolutely disgusting shame for our species and in particular because these experiments were largely grant securing.
I would argue we treat pigs (which are comparable to dogs in terms of intelligence) raised for slaughter much worse than these dogs. Yet I still eat bacon.
Moral consistency on animal welfare is really hard because we have so many blind spots due to how commonplace some practices are. There is definitely a push for ending things like cosmetics testing on animals[1], but I'm not sure we can or should stop testing things like cancer treatments on animals. At least not until we have viable alternatives.
Is it really a blind spot if you're aware yet still continue to support the behavior? Seems like mental gymnastics to feel less bad. "Well, I'm not absolutely certain this particular pig was mistreated, so..."
> I would argue we treat pigs (which are comparable to dogs in terms of intelligence)
Closer to toddlers actually. I'm not a vegetarian or animals rights activist or anything but I'm kind of surprised people eat pigs with how smart they are.
> pigs (which are comparable to dogs in terms of intelligence)
You must really like dogs. Pig intelligence is vastly superior to dog intelligence. Pigs basically are as smart as children, with a full range of emotion. Seriously, stop eating them. Be an example rather than entitled to indulge horrid tastes. We can all live without.
People like that don't rationalize it. You cannot win the ethical argument against eating animals. One simply ignores morals or does not care. And I don't mean this in an attacking way because we all do this to some extent.
Under which ethical framework is it possible to justify industrial slaughtering of animals?
When you say "some people have different values" you probably mean "some people have simply not thought it through". I really don't think there's an ethical framework that favours industrial meat production. But please surprise me.
Now, most people have inconsistent ethics. Which I think is a different thing. I think most people that engage with the industrial meat complex simply ignore the ethical implications, that's actually quite easy to do and even more so when most people are just inconsistent when it comes to ethics. Sometimes people are utilitarians, other times they behave like deontologists and other times they will apply ethics of care.
I believe we are constantly building our own personal ethical frameworks. And that's kind of what you're alluding to, but I also think it's important to acknowledge that consistency is important, and I believe if we really tried to accomplish that most people would be faced with a very harsh reality. It's a struggle but we should be more honest with ourselves and the rest.
> Under which ethical framework is it possible to justify industrial slaughtering of animals?
The one in which human comfort takes precedence over that of a domesticated species which have been selectively bred over generations to produce meat for consumption. The industrial process is tertiary to the slaughter itself and the economics of meat consumption. You can argue about 'industrialization' of anything -- resource extraction and industrial agriculture at large destroy life on a massive scale.
> When you say "some people have different values" you probably mean "some people have simply not thought it through"
No, some people don't value animal life that has been domesticate specifically for food production. Not many people want a domestic pig in their house, so why do they exist? Not by natural selection and not for their own sake. We made them and we eat them and we don't care because we also don't care about paramecium and the pigs certainly wouldn't care if you were being fed to it, it would just eat you.
> Now, most people have inconsistent ethics.
Sure, I will grant you that and go one further -- all people have inconsistent ethics.
Why do you care about pigs and not amoebas? Is it because one has a brain? Is it because one is multicellular? Is it because one is cute, or intelligent? What are the criteria? List all of your ethical criteria for food consumption and 'willing to argue that people who do it are bad people' and then list the features of everything you do and the consequences of those things and cross reference -- now, when you find a conflict, highlight it and then stop doing it. I bet you can't without seriously inconveniencing yourself to the point where you justify not following through.
> It's a struggle but we should be more honest with ourselves and the rest.
Absolutely agree. Self-awareness is the most important trait. I think that the term 'good person' can be roughly defined to mean 'self-aware and willing to correct after reflection'.
>> Under which ethical framework is it possible to justify industrial slaughtering of animals?
> The one in which human comfort takes precedence over that of a domesticated species which have been selectively bred over generations to produce meat for consumption. The industrial process is tertiary to the slaughter itself and the economics of meat consumption. You can argue about 'industrialization' of anything -- resource extraction and industrial agriculture at large destroy life on a massive scale.
How is human comfort an "ethical framework"? I'm not sure you understand what ethics are.
So, in short, most people think it’s wrong to permanently end a creatures life because you get some temporary good feelings out of it.
You can prescribe a value, but if temporary sensory pleasures truly outweigh the entire lives of other beings, there may be neurological issues affecting compassion.
Then I would argue that there is no difference in comfort when living a life fueled by dead animals and their excretions versus a life fueled by plants.
Most individuals are comfortable admitting that they prefer to not abstain from things like steak and cheese because those things simply taste good. That, to me, is hedonistic pleasure: unnecessary, and an invalid argument for the continued abuse and slaughter of billions of animals around the world.
Many people (including me) do not take any pleasure in eating. In fact it is a chore. If I had to conform to a vegan diet I would literally not get enough nutrients for lack of motivation.
As an athlete that’s been vegan for nearly 5 years, I promise you it’s not that difficult.
But are you truly convinced that your lack of motivation to properly sustain yourself is worth the needless killing of animals and serious impact on the environment? If you’re here asking about moral frameworks and nitpicking definitions, I don’t think you are.
I contend it is not needless, and I contend that you are cause of just as much loss of life as I am through your actions. Though those lives may not meet your qualifications because you also make a judgement about what deserves your empathy and what does not -- and you have every right to. However you have no right to judge others.
People who do that come off like that 'born again' uncle everyone has who you have to avoid because you know that they are constantly thinking about how 'saved' they are and how you are walking the wayward path and every second sentence has to do with Jesus or politics centered around Jesus.
You don't care that he has his beliefs but you realize how he has taken one thing that he feels strong about philosophically and refuses to allow anyone else the same dignity of having their own moral compass free of side-eye and proselytizing. And that makes him extremely annoying to be around.
>I contend that you are cause of just as much loss of life as I am through your actions.
That's patently false. More than 85 billion land animals alone are slaughtered annually for food. Trillions if you include sea life. Regardless, any incidental deaths like rats or frogs getting crushed while harvesting vegetables are just not on the same ethical plane as factory farmed animals whose entire purpose for existing is to be slaughtered for mere human flavor preference.
You have yet to substantiate your position in any way other than a lack of motivation, and the evidence simply doesn't support your assertion that vegans cause just as much loss of life as people who regularly eat animals.
You can check this external source out as a starting point:
> If I had to conform to a vegan diet I would literally not get enough nutrients for lack of motivation.
I sincerely welcome any credible evidence you can provide that feeding animals plants for years and then slaughtering them for a few meals worth of food somehow equates to less use of virtually any resources compared to just eating the damn plants.
It's pretty appalling to see such disregard to non-human life. As if the fact that animals have been domesticated somehow made them lesser beings.
I mean, I guess you come at it from a sort of utilitarian maybe epicurean perspective? The idea of maximising human pleasure? What does the word "comfort" really means in this context? For example, people who take heroin or morphine feel great comfort; should we administer a lethal dosis of morphine to everyone at once? And of course we can argue that industrialization brings destruction I mean a big argument against mass agriculture is precisely that. Some argue that we should go back to more local food sources for this reason, de industralise our society a bit and I can see merit to that.
But really, the question I guess I'm asking is why do you place humans on the center to begin with? Is it because we are capable of overpowering other species and do with them as we want that there is justification to our actions? It seems you're really hammering on the concept of domestication, but why? Why is for example a domesticated pig less worthy of living than a domesticated dog, or a domesticated plant or a human? If someone commits a crime, is it okay for society to punish them in return? What if that person didn't know they were committing a crime, is it still okay to punish them? What if the person does not have the capability to understand that they are committing a crime? What if the person is not a human, but a pig? Is it possible to assign the category of person to an animal? Some philosophers and scientists believe that's a discussion worth having.
It's funny to me that you're taking such a defensive position just at the mention that maybe meat consumption requires a more thorough examination of our personal ethics. I think veganism is a very tough fight in modern society, which is why I think this is an issue that needs to be tackled in a much more systemic way. The first step is just making a societal decision on these questions you ask me. Is a chicken okay? Is a pig okay? Is an amoeba okay? Is a human okay? I think most people will feel disgusted and repulsed at the notion of eating another human being; but why? Is it as significantly different from a pig as a pig is to a plant? Is an amoeba capable of suffering? Do they feel pain? We know for certain that pigs feel pain as we've studied their brains and behaviour but amoeba, for example, don't have any of the necessary cellular components to feel "pain" as animals experience it. But this position can be challenged as well, why pain?
Like you said, there might be a myriad of reasons why someone would find eating animals objectionable and there might be reasons why we might find it necessary as well (for example, health reasons). I am simply wondering "is pleasure reason enough to eat animals the way we eat them?". For you, it seems like pleasure is reason enough, I wonder if you're in favour of the legalisation of all drugs? What about killing people for pleasure, if a serial killer finds infinite pleasure in the act of killing... should he be allowed? Or should we also take into account the suffering of the victim?
I actually find the term "good person" a bit... i don't know. I don't like it. The way I position myself in the world, I'm not a deontologist, I think a lot of these things are subjective. Consistence is important to me and I try to be consistent; we all have failings but I think admitting that we are flawed is the first step. And personally, I believe eating meat is an ethical failing as there are many others. People lie and cheat all the time, it doesn't necessarily make them bad. People hurt others in the pursuit of pleasure, it doesn't mean they are bad. I agree with you when you talk about the importance of willingness to correct after self reflection.
Ultimately my point is that eating meat is actually a really challenging philosophical problem that I don't think we really take it as seriously as we should, because it's much easier to ignore the problem than face the reality of our actions and think of the consequences that course correcting them might have on our lives and societies as a whole. I view our meat eating an addiction at the societal level, and I think in order to get to a healthy consumption (which might mean little or none) we would need to treat the issue the same way we treat addiction problems on communities. That's why to me acknowledging that we have a problem is such an important first step. I've realised now in this thread that many people don't think we even have a problem at all, that's a bit of a surprise for me.
> But really, the question I guess I'm asking is why do you place humans on the center to begin with?
You don't? Please tell me that you are not advocating reallocating half of all hospital funds to animal shelters in order to equalize the balance between us and domesticated animals.
> It seems you're really hammering on the concept of domestication, but why?
Because it explains the value system. We domesticated animals to eat them. Pigs ate the food scraps we couldn't and we ate them. I'm not sure what is unclear to you about this setup.
> Why is for example a domesticated pig less worthy of living than a domesticated dog, or a domesticated plant or a human?
Everything has life worthy of living. My question to you is why you don't cry over the single celled organism holocaust every time you wash your hands? Are their lives not worthy? We compartmentalize and prioritize -- you do it just as much as I do, you just feel like judging me for being honest about what mine are.
I thought I was clear in saying that life in itself might not be enough?
Why would you say something "everything has life worthy of living" why? I actually disagree with this statement. Animals like pigs or dogs or humans are not just living beings, they also have complex mental processes. Did you know pigs are very much aware of deaths in their close families? These are complex animals that feel both physical and emotional pain. I'm sorry you think domestication has turned pigs into walking meat but that's simply not the case. So it's not difficult to justify the ending of lives of bacteria as opposed to pigs, but it is much more difficult to justify the ending of the lives of pigs as opposed to humans.
And I think you really haven't been able to justify your human exceptionalism, instead you simply attack me as if I'm supposed to convince you that this is not the case simply because you "feel" that it's right. And that's my point, you have a dogmatic belief that you're not willing to even challenge.
Obviously I get the instinct of human exceptionalism, but instinct does not make for good reason. Should we allocate half of our hospital resources to animal shelters? I mean, how about we stop eating meat instead? How about we stop the mass consumerism we are trapped in? We don't have to sacrifice the well being of humans to improve the well being of animals. Well, we might have to sacrifice some comfort, because the way we live is simply unsustainable.
> Why would you say something "everything has life worthy of living" why?
I'm confused. You qualify some life as exceptional and other life as not. Because of 'complexity'? How is one thing different from another?
> So it's not difficult to justify the ending of lives of bacteria as opposed to pigs, but it is much more difficult to justify the ending of the lives of pigs as opposed to humans.
According to what? Because they have emotions and care about family? How do you know? You anthropomorphize an animal and use that to justify your stance -- and complain about human centric thinking.
> And I think you really haven't been able to justify your human exceptionalism
I never even attempted to do so. I said it is innate to humans to do that. You just did it without even realizing it by ascribing human qualities to pigs to justify why they should be treated better than other animals.
> instead you simply attack me as if I'm supposed to convince you that this is not the case simply because you "feel" that it's right.
Oh please. I haven't been emotional even a tiny bit here and I haven't attacked anyone. You feel attacked, but if you re-read this entire conversation what is being attacked is a push to see that there is no absolute moral decision one can make about animal life and food without contradiction on many levels. I happen to pick the dubious morality accepted by the vast vast majority of human society throughout recorded history and I acknowledge that it is flawed, and I have no qualms picking my own species comfort over those lower in the food chain which have been adapted by us for utilitarian purpose.
> Obviously I get the instinct of human exceptionalism, but instinct does not make for good reason.
No, but it doesn't have to, because you can't escape it. It is innate.
Look, I don't agree with industrially processing animal life to be a mass commodity but I can't separate 'killing a whole lot of them at once centrally' with 'killing a few in disparate locations'. But I will defend eating meat against vague philosophical word salads that do nothing but claim the same thing I am but with a different set of qualifications for what is and is not worthy of our empathy for reasons just as dubious as mine. At least I admit it.
> Under which ethical framework is it possible to justify industrial slaughtering of animals?
Most major religions for starts. Probably not the answer you were looking for, nor one that sits well with you, but it is nevertheless the truth.
Perhaps you, like myself, are an atheist. Well it turns out that most atheists eat meat too. So the evidence points towards industrial slaughter being ethical in most secular ethical frameworks as well.
inb4 "it's not a real ethical framework if I disagree with it."
It strikes me as more of an ethical dilemma. I've known quite a few devout vegans who resumed eating animals when their health declined and they could not reverse it without abandoning veganism.
The dilemma being that despite the harm caused, our species developed to eat animal products, and it's difficult to fully replace that.
That's an interesting point. Some people might really need to supplement their diets with certain animal products, though as far as I know, a vegetarian diet or a diet that includes very little meat consumption is more than enough for most people in terms of health requirements.
Yet that's not really the case, we eat a lot of meat. And red meat as well which really is not necessary in our diets. I believe trying to argue from a naturalist perspective is rather dishonest in that it's by no means the real reason why people consume meat. People consume meat the way they do because it's a cultural expectation as well as a highly pleasurable act for most.
So really, to me, the dilemma has much more to do with how much pleasure are we willing to give up as a society and I really don't think that goes very far. I mean, this debate has also ramifications when it comes to the climate; how much are we willing to give up in comfort and pleasure to curtail the ecological disaster we are causing? The answer: not much really.
In my opinion these are really failings of our political systems, so in other words, the system that's supposed to help us make decisions for our society as a whole. I'm pretty sure most people would agree that maybe in a reasonable amount of time we'd like to see changes to our diets, it's an interesting discussion to have and there could be long term plans to achieve it that could be very much realistic... but our political system simply does not allow the for the discussion to be had in the first place.
It's primarily about what livers produce, which determines which chemicals are vitamins (which varies across mammals, for example) and which amino acids (the lego blocks that form proteins) are "essential amino acids" for a species.
It's possible as a human to ingest from non animal sources all the essential nutrients, but there's HUGE misdirection in at least american commerce about how to do so. For instance, labels talk about grams of protein, which is inadequate: you could be ingesting a ton of a subset of amino acids in protein, and entirely deficient in an essential amino acid.
It seems that eating animals was a heuristic that supplies essential amino acids and vitamins.
Just to clarify because it’s not obvious in your comment (but not alluded to either): it is very much possible to opt out of animal cruelty for food and eat a vegan diet while being healthy.
It's a slippery slope. You can't test on people, and need animals that have similar drug kinetics. That being said, so much drug research is unnecessary garbage, and living beings pay the price.
I worked in immunotherapeutics and gave cancer to ~25 mice. I can't say it helped progress the field much, and I still feel bad. Cannot imagine what it's like to give cancer to a dog.
To study cures for cancer you need to induce the exact type of cancer you are trying to treat in dozens of identical animals that are as similar as possible to humans, and do so in a reproducible way. suggesting you could just go and work with any old animal that happens to have some sort of cancer is incredibly naive.
You were vague, so readers used the most probable parse: that the dogs were used for human-medical research.
Anyway, pet owners aren't lining up to volunteer their pets for experimental treatments, so researching dog cancer on random sick dogs isn't a great model either.
Some subset of owners of sick pets DO enroll pets in experimental treatments, which i know from a life among animals. In a personal case, the results amazed the oncologists.
Interesting that you point out the fact that they can't speak. I wonder how much of our willingness to mark animals out as, in some sense, lower than us is down to their lack of human vocalisation ability. I sometimes worry that their thoughts are closer to ours than we give credit for.
I only used 'speak' because the person I was replying to had said:
> What would a dog answer
To me it's interesting that they chose to give a dog the ability to answer. Certainly the ability to speak like a human would factor in 'how much like humans they are'. It's a way of humanizing the dog, which introduces bias, making the dog more human than it really is.
There is no need to pretend dogs are almost people to justify treating them well.
Sure, I wasn't trying to catch you out :-) and I agree that animals should be treated well, of course.
Your mention of speaking just reminded me of a thought I'd had, regarding how we measure where animals' sit on the human-ness scale. I think that metric has a lot of biases in how we weight its constituent factors. I.e. how well an animal can communicate with us - which might be quite orthogonal to its intelligence. (For example an octopus)
Your statement made me realize I should empathize with the machines in the Matrix. After all, a human life is objectively worth less to machines than to humans. A machine can last for centuries and can have more utility on a daily basis than a human.
Different things have different values, which you seem to have realized here: "a human life is objectively worth less to machines" "To machines" is the important part. But unless you're a machine, it would be strange for you to have machine values, so I don't understand why you say that you should empathize with the machines. Unless... are you an LLM?
Anyway, different sorts of things having different values is why so many people are concerned about powerful non-human entities with inhuman motivations (AIs generally, and corporations particularly.) It's also the reason people are afraid of hungry bears (the bear cares more about itself than you.)
I wasn't arguing utility. I'm arguing there there's some value we place on human life that is above a dog's life. It doesn't depend on how much utility one derives from humans vs dogs.
The value judgement could simply come from the fact that we need to preserve our own species, and if we need to sacrifice some small percentage of dogs to do so, than this is perfectly reasonable. We can still exhibit empathy by accepting that this situation is not ideal and striving to reduce that percentage down to 0, maybe by inventing substitutes.
As for the machines example, I would expect the machines to place higher value on their own life than on human life, precisely because they would be objectively superior, which is why I would not let machines exist without any restrictions, even if the machines would be a more useful dominant species.
Utility (= (pleasure minus pain) x time) is the essential good when we're talking about animal and human welfare. Good actions increase expected utility; bad actions decrease expected utility.
Machines experience no pleasure or pain and thus there is zero utility gained/lost by destroying them. Dogs and humans do; it's bad to kill or torture them.
Throwing a dog in front of a train (or killing/torturing it for research) to save a child depends on how likely it is that it will work, and how many QALYs the dog and child have left.
Sure. To me, my daughter's life is worth more than yours, your family's and everyone else who reads HN. I accept that the inverse is true for you.
If I had to press a button to choose between my daughter or all the strangers on HN and their dogs, I would press it and wouldn't even blink.
If it were a stranger's daughter, though, I'd probably ask some questions about the daughter, and if I can't determine that there's something about her that would be worth a million strangers, she would have the same value as an average stranger, so I would opt to save a million strangers.
If I had to choose between a stranger and all dogs on Earth, I would ask some questions about the human, and, absent any red flags, I would choose the human, simply out of the need to preserve my own species, even if I think there's more than enough of us and having dogs around would probably make a lot of people's life better than that one person.
There's plenty of research showing what an ecological disaster dogs are (and other pets too, but dogs are the worst by a large margin for various reasons, including body size). Objectively speaking, if you had to choose between a stranger human and all the dogs on Earth, you'd be doing the planet a big favor by choosing to keep the human alive.
Of course, humans are an ecological disaster too, but a single human out of 8B is a drop in the ocean, and we're not comparing 1 human to 1 dog.
And honestly, I don't see how dogs make anyone's life "easier": they require more care and attention than a toddler, and it never stops until they die. People I know with dogs basically never travel or take any kind of vacation, because they can never leave their dog alone for more than ~8 hours at a time. Any kind of pet is truly a luxury, but dogs require a level of commitment and caretaking well above and beyond almost any other.
Citation for that research would be very interesting, as i've not seen that.
Part of the beauty of living with nonhumans is the invigoration of sharing understanding and cooperation across species.
I think this is normally called "A dog is a man's best friend." or something similar.
I suspect it holds across millenia because that cross species relation is at times more dependable and communicative than individuals of the same species often are capable of, and that's not sarcasm, I mean it's where that phrase comes from. And i say that as someone not averse to humans collaborating, just as someone who lives among many species.
>Part of the beauty of living with nonhumans is the invigoration of sharing understanding and cooperation across species.
I don't see this with dogs at all. People with dogs are basically slaves to the dogs; their entire life revolves around the dog. It's absolutely no different than having a small toddler, except that you can bring toddlers with you places. I don't see how it's healthy or productive to not be allowed to leave your home for more than 6 hours because your dog will destroy stuff or pee or poop if you're gone too long, you can never go on a vacation, everything in your daily life has to be planned around the dog. How this ever got normalized, I have no idea, but it wasn't like this a generation ago.
The dog would say that it has more value, same for a tree, or an ant. If we had to fully protect everything categorized as intelligent/living, we wouldn't do much.
Dogs may be a hard no for someone, and yes for someone else. It's kinda arbitrary.
I think I know what you mean, but the impression was that the tests were for treatments in dogs, perhaps the presumption being they'd work in humans, but that was not clear.
> Is it so outrageous to say that a dog's life has less value than a human's?
The commenter I replied to said "yes"
So the commenter is saying that yes, it is outrageous to say that a dog's life has less value than a human's.
So that implies that it is outrageous to say that because a dog's life does not have less value than a human life. It has equal or greater value. I'm going to assume that the commenter means equal value.
So if a dog's life is equal in value to a humans, it follows we should dedicate as many resources to dog health as human health.
Is any of the above flawed?
> nor was any mention of values made.
We're talking about the relative value of human life vs dog here. The term 'value' has literally been mentioned. Values by definition are what we believe to be valuable. By answering "yes" to the question, the commenter has revealed some of their values as it relates to dog vs. human life.
If they are at all subject to a functional IACUC (i.e. at a university) this is required. The bar for testing things on (especially charismatic) animals is quite high.
Perhaps something about caring for animals attracts depressed or possibly suicidal people in the first place.
Just an anecdote, but within 1 month in 2018, the lady I adopted my dog from(Stacey Radin), my dog walker, and a lady who ran a horse rescue in my hometown all committed suicide(none knew each other). I don't think I know anyone else directly who has committed suicide, and they all worked with animals.
> Several studies have identified a link between suicide and occupation (1), including the healthcare professions and our own profession. The rate of suicide in the veterinary profession has been pegged as close to twice that of the dental profession, more than twice that of the medical profession (2), and 4 times the rate in the general population (3).
You are correct, and why this is the case is an open question. I've heard theories ranging anywhere from the financial (a dental degree costs nearly as much as a medical degree, and the job prospects are more limited) to the physiological (long-term exposure to anaesthetic gases during oral surgery may cause mood changes).
I wonder how much of this is availability of means.
Firearm owners have higher suicide rates just because they have a reliable means at hand. Vets have euthanasia drugs, dentists have gas, doctors have various drugs. Is that taken into account?
I have always assumed it is because they have to hurt people every day while looking them right in the eye. What must that do to someone? (who isn't a psychopath)
> Suicide rates among dentists and a perceived elevated risk for suicide have been debated in academic publications worldwide for decades.
> A 2011 study of the Danish population published in the November 2011 issue of the Journal of Affective Disorders found that dentists had higher age and gender-adjusted rate ratios for suicide and risk for suicide compared with the general population. It reports that dentists held the highest suicide rate at 7.18 percent for men and women combined, and that these suicides rates are much higher than the national average. The national average for men and women was reported as 0.42 percent. Male dentists held the highest suicide rate at 8.02 percent. Female dentists held the fourth highest suicide rate at 5.28 percent.
> In 2017, the British Dental Association found that 17.6% of the dentists they surveyed have seriously considered committing suicide.
> The Center for Disease Control’s most recent report in 2016 on “Suicide Rates by Industry and Occupation” does not list dentists separately, but rather groups them in with other healthcare workers, ranking eleventh. And yet, despite the lack of any hard evidence, the myth regarding dentists being the number one suicide occupation stubbornly persists, casting a negative light on the profession. Not only can this affect the well-being of practitioners, it can also negatively influence perceptions by patients and by students considering dentistry as a prospective career.
As another pointed out, it's worse than the situation for human doctors (although I'm sure you can find a sub-discipline that's closer to veterinarians).
Imagine you're a human doctor, except your patients are mute and can't give consent, and they're brought to you in a sorry state for emergency care by people who are frequently hostile and grossly neglectful to your patients. To that pile of daily woes, add significant student debt, chronic under-staffing issues, and increasing PE ownership.
It's a really tough industry, almost everything is stacked against them. [I've worked in a pet-care-adjacent space for a few years].
Additionally, the skill level, equipment, drugs, etc are not dissimilar to human practice, but the customer expects the bill to be orders of magnitude lower.
Very interesting article that brought up many memories, but this feels like too public a space to discuss given the stigma and anger that can get focused on animal research topics.
It seems like modeling clinical conferences that discuss patient cases that have been particularly upsetting to staff could be a model for animal care staff as well. Something like a monthly meeting where animal care staff and research staff could decompress and discuss the importance of the research that is being conducted while acknowledging the unique emotional toll of working with animals.
There's not much you can do to "decompress" when you go to work, sentence dogs to death, and then go home to your family pet and look at them thinking they could've been one of those dogs. I've met meat packers who still are haunted by the animals they killed.
It's because humans have moral and ethnical frameworks. Despite a document drafting XYZ is okay because "its for science" it still is wrong in the sense you are sacrificing something with a memory, sadness, happiness, etc for a possible "greater good". Especially for dogs, an animal deeply engrained and coevolved with humans, I cannot imagine the amount of cognitive dissonance, or more likely, sociopathy that would be required to engage in such experiments.
We trivialize the fact it's unethical to experiment on humans. I am not a treehugger or anything but to suggest talk therapy will help solve a very real moral and ethical problem...well I'm not sure you understand. Veterinarians have an extremely high suicide rate for a reason. Moreover, I will never forget the callousness of the veterinarian who suggested I put my family dog down for something that wasn't immediately fatal. It's only a small step from that asshole to these assholes and that step is complete transcendence into pathological psychopathy. We simply sometimes benefit from these psychopaths gassing dogs and pigs. It does not imply such a thing is either morally or ethically correct and no amount of "decompressing" will fix it. It just is what it is and some people have developed the pathological brain wiring to allow themselves to do it.
There are a lot of jobs that are necessary in society that have an emotional toll that can't be obviated. All of us, including you and I benefit from the fruits of their labor. Emotional and psychological support in the form of therapy absolutely can ease some of that burden.
I might add a devil's advocate position, albeit colored by my own experiences.
We're predators. We consume other animals. The fact we have found other ways to consume them doesn't make for a moral conundrum.
Indeed, true to the empathic nature of a social species, we even go out of our way to minimize the suffering of our prey.
Do you think the bear does that, as it eats its pray alive? Or the animals that swallow whole & alive, and kill during digestion only? Or parasitic wasps?
You can be as self indulgent and narcissistic as you want, but if you see a loved one painfully dying of a disease that 10 years of no-holds-barred (FDA-unencumbered) medical research could have have prevented, we'll see how quickly your narcissist "think of the animals" self-indulgence will be replaced by "why are authorities letting this happen" self-indulgence.
Virtue comes from doing what is painful but must be done, not indulging in your high horse like a child who's yet to understand the world.
Animals get torn to pieces alive by predators on a routine basis in the wild. Many die before they even get the chance to reach maturity. I'm particularly upset that we are imprisoning people because they fed Cannabis to their hamster, when the normal routine life for animals is so barbaric anyway.
Because we have no alternative for research, and because other animals are cruel with each other, then it absolves us of compassion? By the same token, there are vicious criminals that are unable to control their base instincts so we should all be viciously killing others whenever we feel justified? That’s how psychopaths and wild animals do it after all.
We don’t have to kill animals and make them suffer like we do currently to raise and eat them. We have the knowledge and technology to thrive on a plant based diet.
Research is a very different thing unfortunately. I very much hope we’ll develop theoretical and computer models to avoid the need for research on animals altogether because this is such a cruel and inhumane thing. But right now, there is no alternative unlike any other situation where we use animals historically (clothing, food).
I probably basically agree. Where technology has already replaced the need for consuming an animal, lets use it. Indeed, we already do (pelts aren't much of a thing anymore). But if not, don't sacrifice people over animals.
I think we’re saying the same thing. Diet is where we can absolutely and totally avoid eating animal and animal derived products (at least in developed countries where it’s readily available). It’s healthy and viable, no human is sacrificed for this to happen.
In college, one of my friends worked in an animal lab on campus.
There were something like 3,000 dogs... all in one building... all penned up from birth.
And upon hearing about the 3,000 dogs, I was like, "Can I see them?"
So she snuck me in.
And they were all bred to have some disorder, I don't remember what now, but like the article said... it was fatal.
And we got to the lab at like 9 PM and nobody else was there.
The dogs were all so happy to see us. God they seemed lonely. They were kept in these little like 10x14 pens, 2-3 dogs per pen. Some dogs were in cages.
But like... they were just dogs. Y'know? Most were just happy and looking to be pet, and it was overwhelming to be there.
I got to give some treats.
One of the pens had a dead dog in it, and my friend agonized over dealing with it or waiting until her shift officially started -- she didn't want to leave the dead dog in the pen, and she didn't want people to know she was sneaking her friends in to play with the dogs. So she decided to deal with the dog, and just tell her supervisor she came back for her wallet or something.
Anyway, for a kid 2,500 miles away from home... who missed his dogs... it was really nice to have an hour to play with puppies and young dogs.
As we were leaving she said that most of the dogs were euthanized at the 6-month mark to check for heart defects, or heart issues. Even the healthy dogs.
Fuck it was devastating to hear that.
I'm sure there's a reason and I'm sure we benefit somehow... and a dog who has never seen the sun, and will never see the sun, probably doesn't know what all they are missing... but they have to know, right? Like every living thing has to know they weren't made to sit in a little pen waiting to die.
I don't know, just felt like they should be outside, playing in a field, all that stuff... being mentally challenged and taught how to fetch and instead... they were bred just so their hearts would fail, or so they could be killed and dissected to see why their heart didn't fail.
Most people at the school didn't even know there was a dog lab like that on campus.
> we entered freely and unsupervised in a lab full of animals valued in several ten thousands where anybody could swap the tags of two puppies and ruin the life of a young scientist just for fun, or accidentally introduce a parvovirus after playing with their own pets. And then we touched and played with all the cubs.
Yeah, sure, lad. This is not how it works in the real life.
> a dog who has never seen the sun, and will never see the sun
Why? there is not a sun in your planet?
There is a fair chance that when this dogs are walked in the streets or the university gardens by its caretakers will be able to see the sun, sniff the sun and even to pee in the sun
You are living in a dream world. Those animals exist for research and profit. Why would anyone walk them? Complete waste of time, and not to mention potentially damaging the research by contamination.
Probably because the grants require it, the bioethics committee will watch for it, and the laws regulate it [1]. So if there is a minimum possibility of walking the dogs or enrich their lives, will be used extensively.
[1] (See for example: Council of Europe – European Convention for the Protection of Vertebrate Animals used for Experimental and other Scientific Purposes (ETS No. 123). Strasbourg 1986).
Lets don't be so dumb as to ignore that this is a tightly, strictly, closely regulated field
--------------------------
And also because the investment in money and time is too expensive that nobody wants the risk to neglect the animals and lose it. Not when your entire career, income and wellbeing of your partner and children depends on this animals. And because they are humans of course and like to interact with their lab animals.
Animals that will be used later in extremely critical experiments that could cure horrible diseases forever in both humans --and pets--. Don't forget that. If a medicine for humans is tested in dogs, will be developed for humans but also for dogs at the same time, so, yes there is a sacrifice, but also a big reward for every dog in the planet.
But this will not be discussed because this kind of articles hallucinating hells of crying mice and psycho/broken-hearted lab people, have been written with two obvious purposes: 1) luring naive donors and part them from their money and 2) discourage young adults to work in a field that is critical if we really want --to reduce-- animal and human suffering.
And this is a criminal move, and should be ashamed and mocked every single time.
Maybe it should have been clear after trying to get high off breathing dry ice and alcohol as a kid (urban legend), or reading about experimental methods to elicit panic response, but it became undeniably clear after a bunch of rat sacrifices that CO2 asphyxiation is one of the most unpleasant ways to die. Surprised it's still allowed
Euthanasia by "cervical dislocation" is killing animals by breaking their necks. It may very well be the most humane option, but nothing is gained by using jargon and obfuscation.
People use technical jargon in all kinds of scenarios in which there's no plausible motive for obfuscation, use of jargon isn't evidence of deliberate obfuscation. In this particular case, "break their necks" sounds fairly humane while "cervical dislocation" sounds unpleasantly clinical, so I doubt this particular jargon is intended to obfuscate.
On the other hand, "put it to sleep" is definitely such an obfuscation.
I guess the point is CO2 even in sub lethal concentrations makes them do do something that looks like freaking out and having a terrible time, versus isoflurane which does not
Three months ago, there was a post on HN about Neuralink's treatment of animals. I mentioned that I struggled with the idea of animal testing and meat eating, generally. [1] I was surprised by the lack of empathy for the sentiment. Most were arguments for the necessity of the practice, but I don't think many of the people arguing for the necessity of animal testing could handle being the animal technician. As this article shows, even people in the field struggle with it. I'm not sure it creates a more compassionate society to outsource your industry's cruelty.
That is how slaughterhouses work, at least in the US. Poor migrate workers get to work on the killing floor for low wages and dangerous work. Keeps it out of sight and minds of the more affluent people that eat those animals.
I sympathize. My wife once told me I could not be a vet, because I would need to be able to put the animals down. The more I learn, the more I understand what she meant by it.
I dislike unnecessary suffering and some of it does sound very unnecessary. I can give some level of dispensation for necessary pain, but even then it should be a good reason ( and it seems sometimes the reasons are in the 'not great' category ).
All that said, what are the options here with regards to research animals?
1. We stop research on all animals
2. We don't stop
3. We research even more
4. We adjust it to some more acceptable status quo
Personally, I have a recent opinion that may jar some as I am more and more leaning towards #1. I think what eventually got me was dog cloning services in US.
What will follow is a move a different type of testing ( and hopefully more humane ): human testing.
It will come with its own set of issues, but, at least, subjects will be able to consent.
The impact, I suppose, is uneven. Anecdotally, I knew a young woman who wanted to help people and ended up as a biotech intern at a regenerative medicine institute where she spent her summer giving puncture wounds to rats. It was very hard on her.
This topic is essentially why I postponed my PhD work. I’ve worked with animals for years and I finally found a PhD mentor that I saw my own vision and understanding of neurology in, I was elated. However, after two years, I simply couldn’t work with animals any longer. This essentially has ended my career path in translational medicine. For a long time I was able to continue doing lab work with animals due to the motivation of the “bigger picture.” It seems that is no longer enough. I’m still trying to decide what to do and where to go from here. Psychopharmacology is all I want to do and the kind of research I want to be involved with. As to the techs described in the article, I feel for them. It is evident that their job takes a heavy toll and their role is invaluable in research, yet severely undervalued and under recognized.
A lot of people are assuming this is purely about research for human products/treatments.
The researcher who was the most drained from her work was doing work that was entirely focused on the animals she works with. Veterinary schools use research animals as well.
I think a lot of the diseases and stuff they studied worked better on animals that aged faster than humans.
The way to justify animal testing is to say, "Ok, we can make these animals suffer for 50 years... or we can make humanity continue to suffer or another 250 in order to better understand this and how the disease grows and evolves... what's worse?"
But... that's the only way I can think to justify it.
IMM, animals suffering. Capable humans can speak. "Yeah doc, the lump got bigger, feels like my eyes are about to burst".
Unlike animals who are mute apart from squealing which is the only sign for bad. Whom are mainly kept in-humane conditions, no consensual agreement. Does a Monkey get kept in paradise during the testing runs? Elon's brainchip-chimps research shows just how poorly treated they were.
Lack of lawful-rights, regulations, corrupted-inspections. The odds are stacked against animals; at least us, humans, can reach out if they were being mistreated. I fail to see any justification for animal testing.
It is a valid point, that it may only take twenty-five years on animals, and now we have a pseudo-cure for X. Testing still has to be done on humans, if that fails? Well back to the drawing board with more animal suffering for another twenty-five. So why not just skip straight to humans?
If it takes 250 years, that's 250 years more research on the species it's trying to cure with an high percentage of a foreseeable cure.
It's akin to how most people would be disgusted if shown how animals are slaughtered for meat but most people also have short memories - they will have their outrage and make some commitments about vegetarianism - the equivalent of the Twitter morale outrage but soon their current events catch up with them and the thought and emotion are swept away by the next thing.
I recall a NYT article recently titled something along the lines "you'll forget most of the Covid pandemic and that's a good thing" - and as angry as that title made me I know its right - Solzhenitsyn talked about the memory of the Gulag years fading away from him, getting fat and complacent, turning back to old things - so even if such great trauma is lost in time I have no doubt most people just forget about how pigs are slaughtered in a week or two.
I almost think its almost by evolutionary design, to live otherwise and carry and accumulating all that weight over the course of a life time is very hard. The alternative is to turn into a stone and abandon your humanity altogether. I don't mean to be cynical, it's just an observation.
There seem to be all sorts of coincidental mechanisms that help people move past or forget trauma. A simple example is poor memory formation when sleep deprived; I note that many of my most difficult times have included significant sleep deprivation...
Definitely interesting to read an article about the emotional suffering humans experience due to their proximity to animal suffering. We must be at the center of any story for it to matter.
Bitterness aside, I feel for these animals and for the people trying to make their short lives better.
> Humans have really long life cycles. Imagine how long an experiment that requires 2 generations of humans will take?
And why is that a problem? More research, more study material. In the two generations you'll have a cure+extra compared to a single dedicated animal study, that may not even work on humans. Loosely speaking.
It seems that people are ignoring the fact that we are already experimenting on humans on a fairly large scale: All drugs in most countries are only approved after a scheme involving 3 phases of trials.
Phase 1 trials are to test safety and possibly design input for the next (phase 2) trial. In particular in oncology, there is no expectation that a patient in phase 1 will even potentially benefit from an experimental drug but there will likely be (detrimental) side effects in the high-dose groups at which point we back off.
So let's acknowledge that many of the (more modern) drugs we take are also a result of fairly heroic consent from human patient volunteers without any chance of personal gain.
In the UK, all abattoirs have to have a vet in attendance when they are slaughtering animals. I always thought finding that your job as a vet must feel like a weird career turn. You become a vet to help sick animals and now you're helping kill healthy ones.
I know a couple veterinarians who bounced off this during large animal medicine training, but those that did take an approach not dissimilar to a lot of Heroic Defense Lawyer Protagonists on television: This is going to happen, and its their job to make sure it happens with the absolute minimum of suffering (and also that the animals are indeed healthy).
The rules around working with prisoners or other captive audiences are strict because it’s so easy to apply undue pressure to them.
The goal isn’t just to get someone to say “okay”; the point is to make sure they’re doing so freely and with a complete understanding of the possible outcomes.
> "Do animals consent and understand?" -> "No, because they're animals."
Where is the circle?
> "Do prisoners consent to being imprisoned?" -> "No, because they're prisoners."
Is that circular reasoning too? Or is that simply the flat truth, whether you like it or not?
Where you go wrong is in assuming that seeking the consent of animals is a universal value that everybody else shares with you. But that is not true. The answer to "do animals consent to this" is "No, and so what?" The question you pose is only compelling to people who already share your values. To somebody who doesn't share your values, your argument is easily addressed and dismissed. The animals being eaten don't consent, and we don't care because they're animals.
And this is why if one are interested in huma rights then one should work for prisoners rights. They are the most vulnerable humans to get shit on. If we can treat our criminals with dignity then maybe we can treat everyone else with dignity too.
For human subjects research, studies involving prisoners, along with members of the military, get a higher level of scrutiny precisely because there's very real concerns about their ability to meaningfully provide informed consent.
This sounds grim that this is a big push. Scientists not even working on their own animals, leaving technicians to kill them without ever thanking the technician, and the technician never knowing why animals they feed and clean after for years suffer and die.