Still a better usage of an animal life than eating them. I prefer to advance humanity, even minimally. If you put these numbers in comparison to animal farming, their suffering and their murdering, then it's absolutely worth it. For me it boils down to a simple set of questions. Would you murder 10'000 chickens to save your grandma's life? How about 10'000 cows? How about 10'000 rats? How about 10'000 rabbits? How about 10'000 monkeys? How about saving yourself? Your wife? Your child? Your children? Tens of humans? Hundreds of humans? Thousands of humans? I am willing to sacrifice an insane amount of animal lives in order to save anyone human. We could talk about reducing it, but I would agree only once we replaced the meat industry.
Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
21–30 of 319 posts
Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
#22There are shades of grey on this kind of thing. Testing cosmetics seems a less painful ordeal than some of the more brutal examples given in the article. Another thing. If animal testing was outlawed, the same testing would probably end up being done on poor people instead. Is that worse? I think so.
> If animal testing was outlawed, the same testing would probably end up being done on poor people instead. That's... quite the leap. The entire point is that ethics committees are much more averse to human testing than to animal testing, so we're less conscientious about animal testing.
Since ethics has been invented for human society, there is no surprise for being averse to humans. Neither is that good or bad by nature
Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
#23There's certainly more that could be done to prevent bad or futile research on animals. But there are areas where there is no reasonable way to replace animal testing. How else would you test the safety of a new drug or other chemical? You can't do this in vitro, and going directly into humans is not an acceptable solution in my view.
I mean company can always do better like giving animal better life before testing and not enthusiast after testing? But what happens now? Those animal are tortured, kept in worst condition and after testing is done you know what happens. Most of the testing is not harmful but the way companies handle the testing is worst to animal.
If something is going to human probably means it is safe which should mean safe for animals to some extent imo. But to save 1% of research cost you know researcher don't care about animal life :/
Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
#24Neuroscience is built on animal testing. I can't see a realistic was of learning about the brain without animal experiments, unfortunately.
https://speakingofresearch.com/2015/12/10/importance-of-anim...
Do we want to give up learning the brain? (And other organs but brain is extra special)
Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
#25There are shades of grey on this kind of thing. Testing cosmetics seems a less painful ordeal than some of the more brutal examples given in the article. Another thing. If animal testing was outlawed, the same testing would probably end up being done on poor people instead. Is that worse? I think so.
I think this is a bad take. Poor people will be tested after animal testing so it is not that worst. There are many cases of this one example is [1] Animal testing is unnecessary most of the time. Even when its necessary they are brutally tortured and after testing is over they are simply killed. But you know companies don't think animal deserves to live. We can use simulations etc but you know its hard to change cul…
The use simulations for many things already. That hell's them to determine what to test on animals in many cases, and still they have failures. It's very had to simulate things that we don't know everything about. That's why they do the testing.
Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
#26There's certainly more that could be done to prevent bad or futile research on animals. But there are areas where there is no reasonable way to replace animal testing. How else would you test the safety of a new drug or other chemical? You can't do this in vitro, and going directly into humans is not an acceptable solution in my view.
The article specifically talks about this and you haven't really made a concrete reply to anything they say. The quality of discourse on HN goes up when we all meaningfully engage with the content. The goal shouldn't be to see who is fastest to post a dismissal of the headline.
The article doesn’t actually talk about it in any meaningful way. They talk about it in a statistical fashion: most animal studies are underpowered, most don’t publish, etc.
And sure, I think we can all agree that nobody should be doing useless experiments, whether on animals or not.
But that in no way proves the article’s argument, and it hardly even supports it.
Are we going to test out new CRISPR therapeutic delivery systems in humans? We don’t have a non-living system that replicates a circulatory system, an immune system, and a liver. If the author has a suggestion for how to do things like this safely and effectively without animals, I didn’t hear it.
Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
#27In what way is it exploitative? Animals are not people, there is no way to exploit them!
Anything, living or not, can be exploited. Being a person or nonhuman animal does not exempt one.
Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
#28Ethical treatment of animals is a high priority in sponsored research: https://olaw.nih.gov/resources/tutorial/iacuc.htm
A lot of that stuff is known as humane washing in the animal rights world. Exploiting and inflicting suffering onto animals is almost always unethical. The only way to treat animals ethically is to not test on them at all.
Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
#29TLDR: instead of testing on animals we should use computer simulations and tissue cultures instead.
The authors comparison of kernel bugs to lab testing mice is ridiculous to be honest.
The author cherry picks examples like cosmetics to justify their view, failing to acknowledge a long history of successful testing on animals that led to drugs that help reduce human suffering.
All in all I think the post is bad
Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
#30There's certainly more that could be done to prevent bad or futile research on animals. But there are areas where there is no reasonable way to replace animal testing. How else would you test the safety of a new drug or other chemical? You can't do this in vitro, and going directly into humans is not an acceptable solution in my view.
The article specifically talks about this and you haven't really made a concrete reply to anything they say. The quality of discourse on HN goes up when we all meaningfully engage with the content. The goal shouldn't be to see who is fastest to post a dismissal of the headline.
The article is makings lots of points, I don't find it well focused which makes it harder to make specific replies. For example it talks a lot about animal experiments in cosmetics, but one of the quotes mentions that those are already outlawed in the EU. So I'm not sure what the point is here, if it is to extend that ban to other countries the author should say so, and it's a point I'd certainly agree with.
The author also claims to some extend that animal experiments can be replaced by other methods. In the general case this is simply wrong, you cannot replace all animal experiments. There are cases where you can gain similar information from other experiments without animals, and those should certainly be further developed. But this is really hard to discuss in general, the specifics matter here and not all animal experiments are equal. Animal experiments are also expensive and time consuming, if there are established and reliable alternatives they will find their use.