Edit: Surprised at all the vegans in this thread. I didn’t think there were so many of you. I’m glad you care so much about animal rights, that you’re willing to forego eating them and using products made from them. If you’re not vegan and have moral objections for this, maybe you should look at yourself first and all the animal abuse you sanction by eating animals and using animal products. Did you know dairy cows have to be pregnant to produce milk? They’re artificially inseminated throughout most of their lives. I hope everyone complaining about this also complains about ice cream and cheese. Or else they would be hypocrites who just want to blame others but never look at themselves.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s fucked up to experiment on animals who can’t consent to this? We place so much emphasis on people being the most important thing in the world, we forgot that we are part of the ecosystem too.
Everyone is rushing in here to say it’s fine because we eat meat too. But I find this whole thing g very revealing of attitudes we usually just don’t think about. We’d never farm organs in human embryos because GASP consent and GASP sanctity of life. But we’ll farm organs cross species, which is surely more difficulty, because we’re so comfortable doing all that to animals.
You can take the perspective that it’s fine because meat. Or you can use this to take a second look at eating meat and suddenly it seems pretty fucked up.
I eat meat. Am not talking down to anyone. I just do actually think about the ethics.
I take the perspective that it’s fine because human life is more important and valuable than animal life.
Same reason we should eradicate most mosquitos on the planet to end malaria
That’s not a perspective though, it’s a bald assertion. “It’s fine because we’re important” is like saying “it’s fine because it’s fine,” or more to the point “it’s fine because I say so.”
What makes us important?
A lot of people don’t seem to understand that their logic is circular. Ask someone why they chose the car they did, and half of them will say “well it’s the one I wanted.”
We are, but being a part of the ecosystem doesn’t really mean much. Ecosystems aren’t obligations, authorities, sources of morality or subject to it. They’re just systems of relationships between organisms in a particular place. Whatever humans do, as long as it involves other organisms, that is our role in the local ecosystem. If we start doing something else, we aren’t forgetting our role in the ecosystem, no role was ever assigned to us, our “role” is merely descriptive of what impact we have.
There are plenty of carnivores in the ecosystem. But I can’t think of another one that keeps prey suffering in a box from birth to death in order to feed itself.
It’s funny that we consider ourselves higher organisms because only we can even think about ethics or have ethics. But is it ethical to treat those incapable of ethics unethically?? If we are the only one in the picture with ethics, don’t we have a double responsibility to apply them for all?
If other predators were even capable of animal agriculture, I’d bet that there’s a good chance that they would do it, but that’s of course not really possible to know for sure. If we were going to apply ethics to things like animals that don’t naturally have them, though, wouldn’t we basically be obligated to destroy the natural ecosystem even more than we already do? The natural environment is, for something living it, absolutely horrendous. Not in the same way as things for a farm animal, but still, natural ecosystems tend to result in a situation where organisms must constantly fend of starvation, predation, parasites and infection, and few creatures live as long as they potentially could. If we really cared much about the well being of all the animals out there, we’d basically have to destroy the natural biosphere completely and keep all remaining animals in idealized captive conditions, like pets or zoo animals, to keep them free of predators and disease.
That’s basically the attitude that is resulting in the 6th mass extinction right now.
Yeah, but you see; the animals are useful in a new way so ethics doesn’t matter. We’ll worry about that in 50 years when we no longer need them to grow new organs for us
Animal testing isn’t ideal but for important medical advances, animal testing is the only way to demonstrate safety before human trials. At some point, you have to value the life of a human more than mice.
And some of the testing is fun. Like when they give them a buzzer to get more drugs. Lab rats definitely consent to more cocaine.
Surely you must have some system for valuing certain forms of life over others, otherwise functioning is not really possible given the reality we find ourselves in. For example, pretty much anyone at some level values the lives of humans or more intelligent animals over the lives of, say, mosquitos, cockroaches, flies, etc, but those insects are animals too after all. (And while one certainly might put some value on some insects, I know if I find a ladybug inside I’m decently likely to try to take it outside without hurting it, I’ve never met anyone who would get as worked up about a dead bug as they would a dead cat, or put the same effort into saving a spider that they would into saving another person from a deadly situation. Clearly, the value of such animals is at some level held to be less.) Even further, it would be even more strange to value other living creatures as much as humans, like plants or bacteria (indeed, considering that one involuntarily kills countless bacteria just by existing and must consume plants to live, a hypothetical person who cared just as much about them as people would either have absolutely no regard for the lives of others, or would be consumed by constant guilt to the point of probably being unable to survive in the long run). Clearly then, just about everyone has some sort of hierarchy of what animals are more valuable than others, whether one consciously believes it or not. If intelligence is the metric that one uses to decide this, then one must value humans more than any known animal, because while some are smart, no animal is quite as smart as humans are. If intelligence is not the metric you use, then what is?
This is and will always be small potatoes in terms of the suffering we put relatively intelligent animals through every day.
We would need to slaughter probably 100,000 animals yearly for the US organ demand (at ~50,000 transplants per year and a buffer).
We slaughter 125 MILLION pigs in the US for consumption a year.
Not to mention that “medical grade” pigs will probably be given a golden ticket in terms of care until they are slaughtered, compared to the extremely abysmal environment millions live in today.
If animal welfare is important to you, scientific research is a poor use of advocating resources while we still eat hundreds of pounds of meat yearly. If advocates reduce meat consumption by even a percent or two it would generally greatly outweigh banning animal based research entirely.
Sure, but the article isn’t about the inhumane treatment of our industrial meat production facilities. I’m well aware of them. And I want those gone too.
I mean, you’re probably not the only one who thinks anything.
That said, do you eat meat? If so, the meat and dairy industries systematically do egregious things to millions of animals every day.
I limit my meat consumption, and I don’t drink milk. Not a 100% vegetarian, but it’s better than nothing. One of these days I’ll decide to be a vegetarian again.
Dude if I can preorder a whole pig with a replacement set of lungs too ….
Dinner and an upgrade?
