I Was an Animal Experimenter
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
I Was an Animal Experimenter
1–10 of 84 posts
Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter
#2It is paywalled.
Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter
#3It is paywalled.
With any such article: Google it, and you can read it without paying.
Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter
#4100 years from now, we will look back on the experiments performed on nonhuman animals with the same disgust that we have for the experiments performed on humans by the Nazis.
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." - Martin Luther King Jr.
Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter
#5> That powerful talk made me realize that animals, like us, are sentient beings who have intelligence and experience fear and pain.
Well yes, we're animals. I don't understand why adults still think of humans as somehow being not animals.
Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter
#6I used to do animal experiments and my partner still does them daily. We both had to kill (or as they say in science -sacrifice) the animals ourselves when necessary.
There is a very large body of research that couldn't and can't be done without animal experiments. Both in fundamental and clinical sciences.
However, what I do see is a movement away from usage of macaques towards a higher usage of experiments using flies. Rodents are fundamental in neuroscience and will stay that for a while, as they are both easy to genetically modify and have reasonably sized brain and organs that is comparable to ours.
I've seen several people, PhD students, but also top-level scientists, moving away from using animals or mammals for their experiments because of the same realization that the author had. It's important that we realize what we are doing to the animals, but the end of animal experimentation is not yet in sight.
Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter
#7> That powerful talk made me realize that animals, like us, are sentient beings who have intelligence and experience fear and pain. Well yes, we're animals. I don't understand why adults still think of humans as somehow being not animals.
Especially the most basic and primitive emotions/sensations that influence our behavior very directly, like pain or panic.
I get how fish might not experience "culture shock", "weltschmerz" or "ennui", but most of the things we feel every day aren't special at all.
Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter
#8100 years from now, we will look back on the experiments performed on nonhuman animals with the same disgust that we have for the experiments performed on humans by the Nazis. "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." - Martin Luther King Jr.
You have a somewhat naive view about how our moral compass moves as a straight lines from bad to good.
Before the Nazis performed experiments on humans, it was considered horrible to perform experiments on humans.
What Nazis had that allowed them to perform experiments on humans was a carte blanche to do whatever they want by contemporary law, and the ideology that those human beings were in fact "inferior" human beings.
I don't know if you eat fish, chicken and so on, but probably you don't think of yourself as a Nazi if you would. Because you don't consider a chicken at the same level as a human. And this gives you carte blanche to have chicken for dinner and feel absolutely no remorse.
Is it right or wrong? I don't pass judgment. I know all beings have a sense of self and we shouldn't cause pain and take a life for no reason, yet, killing each other and eating each other is part of the cycle of life.
I know that if we consider life sacrosanct and we eat chicken fingers at Chipotle, we need ideology to justify our actions, and so we'll consider animals inferior. If we consider them inferior, they'll be target for experiments, because medical science will continue to evolve.
Depending on how our culture evolves, the moral compass may move in an entirely different direction, where we stop regarding life of any kind as so precious, even human. We'll acknowledge how replaceable we are, and our mortality. This would enable full legalization of humane practices like assisted death for the heavily disabled and terminally ill, and might open the doors again for experimenting on humans to move medicine forward.
You never know.
Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter
#9Animals suffer horrible lives naturally too, and on a much more massive scale. If you're really against animal suffering and dying then a far bigger problem is the existence of wild animals with peak populations, unreliable food supplies, predators, fights and disease. Stopping animal research is like trying to stop global warming by driving slower. Feels like you're making a difference but you're not .
Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter
#10I can say with confidence that this sort of thing would never occur in a modern research laboratory. Note that standards for ethical experimentation on animals (including humans) hadn't really appeared until the 70s and 80s. A couple of points here:
Any type of animal experimentation must be accompanied by an IACUC protocol that is approved by a committee, typically at least 3 people, and usually including a veterinarian, research scientists, and layperson. The protocol justifies why using animals is necessary for the research and exactly how the animals will be cared for during the experiments.
Performing surgery on live animals - You have to be trained in the procedure by practicing on dead animals first. Any surgery that happens must be done under anesthesia using approved chemicals. For example, in fishes and amphibians, this is an anesthetic dose of MS-222.
Sacrificing animals - Typical standards require that the experimenter sacrifice the animal quickly & humanely, using at least 2 methods (chemical and physical) to ensure that the animal is not suffering due to a sublethal dose of your chemical. Again for fishes, this is a lethal dose of MS-222 followed by either pithing or freezing. For rodents this is usually anesthesia followed by cervical dislocation.
Experimental endpoints - You will not get your IACUC approved if you don't have a way of dealing with your live animals after your experiment is over. Simply killing them because you don't have money to keep them around is absolutely forbidden. For fishes, they get released back into the ocean or kept around for aquarium outreach purposes.
The issue of animal rights is an important one. For example I personally think that the IACUC protocols don't go far enough. Nonvertebrate animals are typically not covered by IACUC at all so this means that it is legally above the board to vivisect slugs without anesthesia. Of course you might not think that slugs deserve rights but this is a debate that needs to happen. In particular many countries do not cover cephalopods (octopuses, squids, etc) under their animal use laws..