Animals are not for us to eat, wear, or experiment on.Now, while I may personally disagree, I can respect those who make a personal choice not to eat animals or not to wear animals. But I can't respect those who feel that we cannot experiment on them, either. Anyone with any medical understanding whatsoever can tell you the importance of animal testing in learning how medicines and treatments can work for people. Just this past Friday night, our friend Moshe was discussing how testing on mice in his cancer research lab was teaching them quite a bit.
Noble ideals do not always translate into noble results. Issues are almost never black and white - nobody is in favor of 'cruelty to animals', for example, it's a question of what is truly cruel and how much value we place on people as opposed to animals. I cannot respect those who place the lives of animals over those of humans, however.
[Chana has a fascinating story/post on a similar subject. The timing of this post is coincidental.]
Then there's the fact that's not true. We're at the top of the food chain. That's exactly what animals are there for.
ReplyDeleteI completly agree with you, that animal lives come second to human lives. However, historically we've done some experiments on animals that there is really no justification for. The first example I can think of is the studies done on the effect of socialization where baby monkeys were taken away from their mothers and raised in isolation. Either these studies are unspeakably cruel (and there's every indication that they were, since these animals ended up with all sorts of symptoms indicative of severe emotional problems) or they are utterly useless (If the animals don't have emotional lives that parallel those of humans, what good is it to us to study them?). Most of that research has stopped, but that is the root of those protests. People are still acting out of (reasonable) bias from what was being done 40 years ago, without considering the advances that have been made since.
ReplyDelete(also, the hidden upside to medical testing on animals: If your dog test cancer, we are about as good at treating cancer in dogs as we are in humans, since much of our chemotherapy research has apperently been done in dogs first.)
My friend was once telling me a discussion he had with a girl who was a vegetarian.
ReplyDeleteShe was telling him all about who animals are treated horribly on farms and in their pens etc. etc.
So, his response was: "So, I see you have objections to some farming practices. What does that have to do with eating meat?"
And Ezzie, although you may respect her choice of not eating or wearing animals but that was not the point of her pin. The point of her pin was that YOU (and everyone else around her) shouldn't eat meat. In other words, I'm not so sure she would respect your choice that it is OK to eat meat as much as your respect for her choice not to.
Noyam - Agreed.
ReplyDeleteEmily - I agree. But that some people have done horrible experiments on animals does not mean that "therefore nobody should be allowed to do any". To still be harping on it now to such an extreme is short-sighted.
Avrom - Heh!
That's also true, and that's kind of the point in the post. Her pin says not to eat meat or wear animals - fine, I disagree, she doesn't respect my choice, that's her problem. But her lack of respect for human life vs. animal life in terms of experimantation is appalling.
When my mom was taking medication during and after her chemo and radiation treatment, I read how her medication was a new advanced drug to help stem nausia that results from chemo and radiation treatments. Of course, this drug that was helping her so much had been tested on animals. Of course, all the other drugs that she was taking that was saving her life had been tested on animals. These animals served a noble cause. Because of them, my mother's life was saved. The problem with many of these "pro-animal" activists is that they believe that an animal's life is equal or above that of a human beings. The head of PETA is natoriously known for having compared the killing of chickens for food was the equivalent to, and in some ways worse, than the victims of Auschwitz. Of course, I'm paraphrasing, but that was the jist of her statement. To say that animals should not or cannot be used to help save or increase the quality of life of health of a human being, by being experimented on, is so ridiculously amoral that it's laughable. It's laughable mainly because these people believe they are acting at the apex or morality when in fact they are being completely immoral. For them, it would be better to sacrifice the life or a human to save one animal. For them, it would even be better to EXPERIMENT on human beings rather than experiment on animals for medical testing. Eating or wearing animals is one thing. Saying no to experimentation is in a whole different league. If this person really believes that than she should be boycotting every single drug and vaccine on the planet. I would hate to be around her the next time she gets the mumps or syphilis. As with boycotting Israel, if you're going to root for a cause, you better do it all the way and be prepared to say good-bye to life as you know it.
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Emily, I must say that your example is a poor one. There are other examples that are far worse. Even to that, I must add that the medical and scientific community ITSELF regulated ethics when it came to animal testing long before the government did. By the way, the experiment you're speaking about was not useless. It has been very helpful in other sociological and psychological studies. In any case, I must ask how the example you gave is defined as cruel treatment of animals? I won't go into the rest of the experiment or its point, but I must ask if you know the cruelty that animals inflict upon other animals? You do know that most species separate from their young as soon as they can walk and feed themselves. Isn't that cruel? I mean, the baby grows up without its Mommy and Daddy. If a mother dog gives birth to an invalid or week puppy that cannot suckle, she will naturally smother the baby. Don't you think that's cruel, or is that actually a humane thing to do a handicapped animal? For this example, I must point out the humanity and love for animals that humans show, regardless of whether they eat meat or not. A boy found a dog that was being smothered by its mother. Rather than see the dog be killed by its mom, the boy's family took the dog to the vet. The dog had two extremely deformed front legs that had to be amputated. Because of this, the puppy was dragging itself on the ground. The vet said the dog should be put to sleep because if it drags itself around much longer, it would develop a hole in its chest and chin and develop subsequent infections and die in pain. But, rather than put the dog to sleep, the family went about teaching the dog to walk around on its hind legs, like a human. Let's just put it this way. Nature, in all its glory, is a hell of a lot more cruel to animals than we could ever be. Oh yeah, and animals eat each-other. I think we should go on a campaign to get animals to be vegetarians.
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Ezzie- Yep. People have this nasty tendancy to be very short sighted when they have made up their minds on something. Depending on how old the lady was, she may well have made up her mind in the 70's and never bothered to look at the facts since then. I know there are issues that I was taught about when I was really little that I still can't quite shake. For example, I still belive that when I leave the light on in my room it causes south american farmers to cut down the rainforests until I turn it off (this some how doesn't apply when I'm in the room). I also have this vauge sense that whenever I through out a soda can (instead of recycling it), a spotted owl gets shot and killed. The causes people stand for don't always make sense, and people don't look for things to disprove them. It's possible that the woman just didn't relalize the full extent of what she was saying, and if you'd asked her she would have agreed with you that people's lives always come above animal lives.
ReplyDeleteOC- My example certainly wasn't the cruelest one I could have found, it was just the one that I could think of off the top of my head. The reason I consider it cruel is that, while you're correct, some animals do leave their young as soon as they can walk, the species of monkey these experiments were done on don't. They do maintain family bonds through maturity. And while in the wild, if a baby monkey were orphaned, they would still have had their extended family network. These animals were raised in complete isolation with a furry robot mother and a steel cage robot that fed it. They were trying to see if the monkey would stay with the metal mom with food, or the furry mom. Now, as interesting as it might be that monkeys prefer the furry mother until they're almost starving, it dosn't tell us that much about people that we didnt already know, and the monkeys from this experiment were never able to interact well with other monkeys, much the same was children who are abused and kept from any human contact are. They also displayed behaviors that (in humans) would be symptomatic of severe depression. I don't think we can claim that the data we get from studies like that has any parallel to human behavior without implicitly assuming that the monkeys have mental states like those of humans. So either we did this experiment and there is no benifit to humans, in which case it is rather pointless, or what we were doing to those monkeys was abuse, since it would definatly be abuse to a human, and if we state that they have human like emotional states, we were abusing them. It's not the same as doing that to a human child. I think Genie was much more tragic a case than any of those monkeys, but what we were doing with those animals was deliberate, and many of the researchers working under the lab head in that experiment agreed. That sort of research is no longer being done, and I think we're much better off for it.
I'm well aware of the regulations for animal testing in scientific research, I read animal studies all the time for my major, and I think that the problems have really been fixed since then. Actually, in many ways the regulations for animal studies are stricter than those for human studies. For non invasive studies they certainly go through more review boards (I think it's one for humans and 4 for animals? I'm not sure of the exact numbers, and even those might just be the policy at my univerisity.)
Yes, nature is cruel to animals, and they're pretty cruel to each other. But I seem to recall that we have an obligation to take care of them, and while I absolutly aprove of animal studies when it could save human lives, we still need to be careful about what we do.
Emily - Well, she wasn't that old (maybe late 30's), but I got the feeling that she was pretty adamant about the idea. People don't like to feel stupid about something they back, so they sometimes convince themselves even of illogical extremes.
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ReplyDeleteNASA Astronaut Lisa Nowak Charged With Attempted Murder in Bizarre Love Triangle
I can't believe you missed the obvious analogy to embryonic stem cell research. There's no question that adult monkeys, for example, are vastly more intelligent, more feeling, and more self-aware than a 3-day-old clump of cells. Yet only a few fringe wackos on the left oppose animal testing while the right-most 40% or so of the country opposes embryonic stem cell research.
ReplyDeleteYou write, "I cannot respect those who place the lives of animals over those of humans, however."
Yet you respect those who place the lives of a clump of cells that's going to be flushed over millions of actual, thinking and feeling human beings.
Joel - I don't know enough about stem cell research to go through this completely, but that's a ridiculous comparison. The whole debate over stem cells is: because, with the present state of technology, starting an embryonic stem cell line requires the destruction of a human embryo and/or therapeutic cloning.
ReplyDeleteThis is a moral question that some constitute to be murder. How is that AT ALL similar to what I said?!