I Was an Animal Experimenter

I can confirm that this largely rings true for the UK. The Home Office is the body that deals with the certification of a specified procedure and provides the oversight that animal experimentation is done in the most humane manner that is practical for a given experiment.

I recently completed my doctorate in Pharmacology and I have a Home Office license to perform specific surgical procedures on animals. I have training in surgery, anaesthesia and euthanasia which is routinely assessed to maintain my Home Office license.

The details of the experimental protocol that the poster lists - deprive resource, validate behaviour and reward - are probably correct, sensationalised, but correct. I say that, because this reads like the sort of pain protocols I have been involved with in the past. The simple fact is that to explore whether a pain medication works, you must inflict pain, see whether your drug modifies pain behaviour and repeat to sufficient statistical power.

The details of the experimenter dispatching (killing, euthanising ...) the animals with chloroform, en masse, in a plastic bag is a violation of his license and his colleagues license, it is not a listed method on Schedule 1 Method of Euthanasia. It is one of the facets of animal experimentation regulation that I am proud of, the humane killing of animals ensures minimal distress. The euthanasia regulation for animal experimentation are stricter than those in the food industry and far more stricter than the exemptions that religious faiths have when preparing meat.

Non-vertebrates animals are covered by the ASPA 1986 guidelines in the UK for euthanasia and commonly you must present an anaesthetic regime for all uses of laboratory animals. Octopuses are explicitly named as they are one of the oldest laboratory animals in use — they were pivotal in understanding the role of ions and ion channel pumps in nervous transmission.

You are not going to get a vaccination against HIV for example without animal experimentation at the current state of science.

My parents work in the field and I have worked at a few labs where they do animal experimentation. It's not as bad as the press makes it out to be. People don't work around animals their entire lives without caring about them.

I do not have an answer to the question of whether experimenting on nonhuman animals can be justified out of necessity. I have some thoughts, though:

Assume that in the near future, we give nonhuman animals the same moral value as humans. And then say we wanted to conduct an experiment on an animal to cure a human ailment. Before we harm a nonhuman animal, we need to ask whether we have the right to harm that animal. Because nonhuman animals and humans have the same moral value, this is equivalent to asking whether we would have the right to harm a human in the same position.

So right off the bat, our standard for conducting tests on animals is, "would we have the right to conduct this test on a human?"

Let's also assume that we believe humans must give consent before we have the right to conduct scientific experiments on them. If we apply this to animals, then we need to determine how to get consent from an animal, which seems hairy. And then there's the question of fairness -- if we've already determined that we have the right to perform this test on a human, and we're trying to cure a human ailment, then isn't it selfish to perform the experiment on a nonhuman animal?

But, you may say, what if the gains outweight the cost? If we truly believe that we will gain enough to justify violating the rights of a nonhuman animal, that's consistent with justly violating the rights of a human. And then the question of selfishness comes up again.

> I believe that much bigger issue eating meat, where reason why we cause huge amount of pain to animals comes mostly to , because it taste good.

I believe they are both big issues. My only advice is to be careful not to fall into the trap of classifying one as a less evil (even though it seems that harming animals for our enjoyment is much worse than harming them out of necessity). If we fight to recognize the moral value of nonhuman animals on all fronts, then the world you wish for (only performing experiments out of extreme necessity) will come too. (This is not a personal jab at you -- it's something I noticed in my own thinking, too.)

Your story doesn't stand up to scrutiny. They were studying animal brain tissue, to the point that chemical sensitivity was important, but giant blunt force trauma wasn't?

Why not use carbon dioxide or nitrogen asphyxiation (both are painless, the latter is 'mental traumaless') which wouldn't damage the animal at all, and which I know for a fact are the preferred methods at my old university (a fellow Ph D student was performing macular-degeneration drug treatment experiments on rabbits).

Your final anecdote is also suspect: (1) no sources. But (2), let's grant it as true: the extreme actions of one individual have never been considered adequate justification for carte blanch restriction of anything.

It is morally illogical to grant non-human values equivalent human moral value. We certainly don't grant it to ameoba, bacteria, the tiny multi-cellular organisms that live on our skin. The micro-wasp (which the aforementioned ameoba is larger than, but which has neurons).

But you can win any argument by first granting that it must be true, which is what you do in your second paragraph.