Dear Science,
Why do scientists still do so much animal research? Aren’t there a whole bunch of tests now available that don’t require the killing of animals? I’ve read about things like cell and organ culture and computational biology. Aren’t these methods more accurate, less costly, and generally better science? I’ve read that animal tests don’t really tell us much about how things work in people—experiments on humans are the key. Didn’t the major scientific journal Nature even recently publish an article making that very point? It seems wrong to subject animals to suffering and pain in experiments that really don’t help human health.
Concerned Animal Lover
Performing an experiment in an American research lab—particularly in an academic, government-funded research lab—is an astoundingly onerous task. A packet of paperwork on the scale of a moderately sized town’s phonebook must be completed and renewed annually. Regulations are scrupulously adhered to—under threat of an individual lab or entire university losing funding. Every one of these packets must have a justification for the experiment, an accounting of the number of animals you must use (with documentation that you cannot accomplish the task with fewer), and, finally, a section indicating you’ve exhausted the alternative, non-animal-using approaches. Even in the interval decade that your correspondent has been working in labs, there has been a noticeable tightening of the rules and oversight of animal-based experiments. Thanks to these regulations (hard fought for by animal-rights activists), no scientists in their right minds do an experiment involving animals that can be done some other way.
Cells growing in a dish or experiments run on a computer only get one so far. Some of the trickiest outstanding questions in biology—the questions most important for medical research—require a complete organism with all the interlocking parts that make up a living thing. Most important drugs work on that level; things invented in a dish often fail when faced with the hundreds of cell types all interacting in a full organism. Mice, most often of all mammals, end up the subjects of modern biological research. Their nonhumanness—the short life spans, quick breeding cycles, genomes amenable to manipulation, and carefully established and maintained inbred strains—make mice invaluable in new medical and biological discoveries. Humans are wondrously complex, hugely outbred, and long living, and therefore a terrible (and, needless to say, unethical) starting point for the testing of most new medical ideas.
Scientists reluctantly resort to animal research. Contrary to some of the propaganda, most of my colleagues who have worked with animals have felt a genuine and deep respect for the sacrifice—painfully balancing the ethical considerations in their work. Even Tom Regan would be proud of them.
Reluctantly Yours,
Science
Send your science questions to
dearscience@thestranger.com.
@42
Even Vegans can’t cast stones against hunters. One of my friends is from the Canadian praries and tells all sorts of stories about hunting gophers to prevent them from eating wheat, corn, soy, barley and canola crops. From what I understand, unless you’re a vegan that only eats food grown in the wild, there’s a decent chance animals are being hunted so you can eat.
This is a hard one for me. I love animals, have been vegan for 10 years and I work in medical research that inevitably includes animal work. The promise science holds off alleviating suffering due to disease, absolutely make it an ethical imperative. It’s an imperative derived from the same utilitarian principle that demands veganism; strive to decrease suffering and maximize happiness.
And one just cannot learn about a living system without examining an actual living system. Cell culture is great and informative and all, but even it requires animals to die. Many human cells are cultured with animal serum. Antibodies necessary in molecular biology techniques used to glean information from the cultures are produced in mice and rabbits– critters who don’t survive their production.
It comes down to weighing the costs and benefits. And I certainly don’t believe everything done to animals in the name of science is OK. Toxicology testing of cosmetics and routine household cleaners stands out as being of trivial value. For me, it’s reasonable to give up eating meat. It’s not reasonable to give up life-saving medical treatment.
We do the same weighing when we do scientific research on humans (which is done, ethically outside of concentration camps. They’re called clinical trials.). There isn’t a simple answer or principle when it comes to these issues, that says we can never test on humans, or test anything on animals. There is an obligation to wrestle with these issues though.
A lot of people here don’t think the suffering of animal counts at all, and that anything done to them for the benefit of humans is permissible. That’s an incredibly polarized, fundamentalist position. Just as extreme as any radical animal-rights one. It offends me personally because it’s so anti-science in that it appeals to some magical property of humans have which makes them worthy of ethical consideration while excluding animals. The nervous systems and sensory organs of mammals are all extremely similar. That’s an objective fact. We’re more similar than not. So of course animals suffer, of course they are subjects of a life. To say we shouldn’t care about that is extreme in my mind. Why the hell not?
@42 and @52, There are plenty of acceptable forms of hunting. Crops need to be protected for human consumption. Irresponsible hunting practices killed off most of the wolves, thus without hunting, deer populations would be impossible to control and would cause plenty of trouble. At least with deer, too, the animal is typically eaten.
Hunting becomes a lot less defensible though when you talk about hunting cougars, bears, and pretty much anything else you don’t typically eat. If a predator poses a threat to humans and cannot be tranquilized and moved to where it is no longer a threat, fine, maybe it has to be killed. But otherwise, I don’t see how it’s okay.
I can understand protection of crops, population control, and hunting for food (though I suspect the second two are more incidental to the ‘sport’ of hunting), but straight up killing for fun, for heads to mount on the wall is not okay, to say the least.
Anyway, people like SPW and Ingrate need to put a lot more energy into voicing their outrage at things like animal cosmetics testing and factory farming.
When I was a kid, I liked animals better than I liked humans. I read James Herriot obsessively, and would gladly sit in the woods -perfectly still- for an hour or more on the off chance that I would see wild things before they saw me. I had amazing, moving, close-up experiences observing wild deer, mink, river otters, beavers, birds, frogs… and yet I’m now pursuing an educational track that makes me personally responsible for the death of 8 baby mice (and one adult) in the last 24 hours alone. How does this happen?
My research is related to Alzheimer’s disease, or at least to a tiny part of the puzzle of progressive neurodegenerative pathology. This is a part that may or may not some day play a role in preventing or treating disease. More than likely I won’t make a major breakthrough in my lifetime, and certainly not soon enough for my grandpa, who has recently started showing symptoms of cognitive decline.
I really and truly see both sides on this one… On the one hand, I find the true-life horror stories of lab animal misuse completely abhorrent, and I go back and forth myself over whether we as humans have the right to declare “proper” use of these creatures we cultivate. On the other hand, I subsequently hold my own animal use to a rigorous standard. No unnecessary breeding, no avoidable pain or fear, and death is swift and unanticipated. I appreciate and encourage movement in the scientific community towards these high standards.
In the end, the calculus for me does (usually) work out such that animal research is a necessary harm. There are concrete benefits, and not just to humans. For what it’s worth, we scientists shouldn’t be pegged as heartless bastards without empathy. When a mouse I bred dies due to birthing complications, I mourn. When a mistake of my technique causes a primary culture to become contaminated, I don’t just grieve the lost time and effort, but also the pups I sac’d to make the culture in the first place. I am not the only one.
Nobody, not PETA, not anybody, really cares about ALL animals. 99.9999% of all the animals killed in scientific research are fruit flies and roundworms. Each week in my lab, for example, I let more (near-microscopic) roundworms die than there are monkeys in all the primate research labs in the world. [I don’t let the worms die for fun, but from necessity – They die from starvation; one roundworm gives rise to 50,000 baby roundworms each week, and there simply isn’t enough food available for them all). If PETA were honest they’d have closeup drawings of fruit fly faces on their propaganda rather than pictures of monkeys. It’s a little bit like the anti-abortion propaganda that always seems to feature the rare aborted 3rd-trimester foetus rather than the usual 6-week-old foetus.
So let us make clear what the opponents of animal research are saying – they don’t want experiments done on CUDDLY, FURRY animals: dogs, cats, monkeys, or rabbits. But other less cuddly animals, even though those animals can feel pain? Animals we would have no compunction about crushing were we to find them scuttling across our kitchen floor? Those PETA doesn’t care about…and neither does anybody else who talks about “animal rights.” I have found that the cell biologists and invertebrate zoologists who study these organisms for medical and biological research have a lot more care and empathy for life – all life – than do the vast majority of zealots who scream about “animal rights.”
To all the philosophers out there: what’s the difference between morality and sentimentality? Can something be emotionally distressing yet be sound morally? This question always comes up for me when I hear the arguments of animal rights activist and anti-abortion activist.
To all the philosophers out there: what’s the difference between morality and sentimentality? Can something be emotionally distressing yet be sound morally? This question always comes up for me when I hear the arguments of animal rights activist and anti-abortion activist.
I think that people who complain about how humans treat animals, even in less than ideal situations like factory farms, and especially in research labs and most of our homes have at best a pathetically naïve opinion of what makes an animal happy and usually a dangerously naïve opinion of the kind of life an animal expects to live in its natural environment.
Even factory farmed animals live longer, healthier, happier lives and enjoy swifter, cleaner deaths than they could ever begin to expect at the hands of predators, harsh weather, or their own siblings.
An animal in a cage, raised in a cage, fed by human hands, does not know what it’s missing. Animals, all the way up to primates, want food, comfort, safety, and really truly don’t care how they get it.
@59, Factory farming isn’t just an animal welfare thing. Aside from the issues of overcrowding (and accompanying practices, like debeaking in chickens), higher transmission of (due to misuse of antibiotics) more dangerous diseases, and poor diet directly affecting factory farmed animals, there are a number of issues affecting humans.
Factory farming is terrible for human health, biodiversity, and our watersheds. The animals are overmedicated which leads to the creation of drug resistant diseases that can be passed on to humans and cause human deaths. Factory farming promotes monoculture. Single breeds of livestock and corn are used to maximize yields. This makes populations more susceptible to disease, and makes it harder for local ecosystems to recover from any type of plight that might befall it. Factory farming produces a great deal of pollution. The concentrated populations of animals have a tendency of getting their drug and chemical laden shit into the local watersheds, totally screwing up the quality of tap water and aquatic life both locally and miles downstream.
It just so happens to be that animal welfare was the facet of factory farming relevant to this post.
I think it’s dangerous to restrict science based on personal feelings. I think given our current knowledge we can determine when it’s absolutely necessary to test verifiable ideas on animals that we’ll later kill, if not to understand better how they work, then to better understand the way life works, and hopefully relate that knowledge back to ourselves. I mean, I don’t see scientists as this evil group of sinister monsters looking to torture animals for a profit, and considering what we get out of it, the number of lives we save, the great advancements of our time, I’d say the ends justify the means. The only alternative is to use a real live human, and hope your theory holds out.
Let me put it a different way, if you were to tell me “curing cancer would take X number of killed animal sacrifice” that X number would have to be pretty large before I cared. But if the cure worked, and hindsight being 20/20, that X could have been a million or more, because we fucking cured cancer. It would be a big fucking deal, and while many animals unwillingly sacrificed their lives for this cure do you think the people with cancer care? Do you think if you got cancer, and you were in the hospital with mind-numbing pain you’d care how many animals would have to die to fix you? I wouldn’t, but I would suspect many people would stick to their principals, and I admire that, but I also think it’s insanely naive to think any animal that is raised with the intention to be killed is somehow ritualistic sacrifice deserving of the highest attack. In some ways? Get the fuck over it.
Life is abundant, we can create life, and we can take it away, and so can just about every other species on this planet. At least the scientists aren’t being irresponsible, like how the people who sell meat regularly are. I think when animal rights groups support this they link up with the science deniers, who think it’s all harry potter to test drugs on animals, and while their point is valid, they should be pressing way harder on cow torture rather than science rats.
@57. Morals and sentimentality go hand in hand often because morals are just rules generally without justification beyond an emotional one. Ethics on the other hand, are a philosophical study of morality. An ethical framework or set of principles is morality built on logic.
Animal rights are not sentimentality. Peter Singer has made a case for them based on a Utilitarian ethical framework and Tom Regan has made a Kantian case for them. Both cases are rigorously logical.
Yes, there is a difference between ethics and being sentimental, as being sentimental requires only an appeal to emotional intuition and not logic. Generally our intuitions are correct, but not always.
Often times people who are oppose to animal rights positions are the ones who are overly sentimental, clinging to the belief that humans are much more precious than animals for mystical reasons or that having a favorite meaty treat is such a colossal good that it surpasses any consideration for the interests of the animal.
@62 I agree with your last paragraph, and I have worked as a research associate before.
It is an inescapable fact that all life depends on the death of others. There is nothing wrong with putting all life on an “equal” level, but you must realize that you will be killing equals, and you have to just deal with it.
I have no problem with animal research, what #7 said earlier was completely true–animals in research live far better lives than those in industrial agriculture. I’ve euthanized animals. Was it sad? Yes. However, I can attest their deaths were done with far greater care and humanity than for those done to farm animals, and even pets in some cases. Should we minimize animal research? Certainly. Can we eliminate it? Probably not.
Even if we finally got headless human bodies for human research, we would still need some form of animal model for use in veterinary medicine. All those medications extending the life of your dog? Yeah, other dogs died for that. Not always–nowadays many research groups are adopting out their dogs. Check it out and adopt a research dog.
But what Salad said is true–we can’t dismiss animal right’s activists opinions as mere sentimentalism without recognizing that our reluctance to go forward with human embryonic tissue research, generating headless human bodies, and so on, is sentimentalism in its own right.
As regards to the “monkey boiling”. As anyone can read on KIRO’s site, the incident was a tragic accident. It should never have happened, and the people involved were terribly upset about it. I know people that worked there–most of them do care for those monkeys and do what they can to make their lives better.
@ 59
“Even factory farmed animals live longer, healthier, happier lives and enjoy swifter, cleaner deaths than they could ever begin to expect at the hands of predators, harsh weather, or their own siblings.”
This is 100% incorrect. See the work of Peter Singer, or Jonathan Safran-Foer’s latest, Eating Animals. Animals that live in factory farms are cramped into incredibly small spaces, pumped full of antibiotics, deprived access to fresh air and light, etc. They have been genetically modified and fed nutrients so that they grow much bigger in a much smaller timespan, so that they may be slaughtered more quickly.
While testing on animals is more ethically ambiguous, I see no ambiguity in factory/industrial farming. It’s wrong.
It seems obvious to me that the people on this thread who are die-hard anti-animal-testing types misunderstand the nature of animal research. There is no “screaming in pain” or suffering because there are VERY strict rules preventing we researchers from doing anything to an animal that might cause pain or suffering unless they are safely under anesthesia first and can feel none of the pain. And, of course, it is absolutely right for the rules to be so strict, and the punishment for breaking the rules is very severe.
Of course if you simply object to any animal being kept in captivity, that’s another matter entirely. But make no mistake, the housing situation of laboratory mice is in NO WAY like a CAFO or other inhumane and unsanitary farm operation. There are strict rules about how many animals may be in a cage, how often the cages are cleaned, quarantining sick animals to protect other animals, etc… And if you were to release these mice into the wild they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves or how to get food that wasn’t provided for them out of a dish. You’re not depriving them of their freedom because these creatures are not wild animals, they are bred to be tame and to thrive in laboratory settings.
@36 Thank you for the point about humans being part of nature. We do not stand above it. If we did I would need to intervene to stop my cat from eating a mouse. It is silly for humans to intervene and stop cats from being cats.
@65 Thank you for the important research that you do.
I study live animals. I have done research on wild animals, and been near to a lot of research on lab animals.
I see IACUC-approved research carried out all the time that results in animal suffering. Keep in mind IACUC might have its own standards that might not align with YOUR standards. IACUC approves of keeping small animals in shoebox-sized enclosures for years with no outside stimuli…sure these animals have ample food and it is warm and they get medical care if they hurt themselves…but these animals end up exhibiting wildly abnormal behaviors (constant backflips 12 hrs a day?). This is just an example. And this is approved by IACUC.
Sure, all research is subject to strict guidelines and must be approved. But I balk when animal research supporters get a little too close to stating that since the research is approved, the animals don’t suffer. They suffer. Sure, when researchers lesion a part of a mouse’s brain they give it painkiller, but it still suffers. Suffering happens.
Researchers do their best to make sure an animal suffers as little as possible. And this is what makes the suffering acceptable in the end. Oh and sure, lab birds aren’t packed in as tightly as factory farmed chickens, but at least we aren’t injecting chemicals directly into farmed chicken’s brains that stop some vital process.
The issue should be whether or not we think that this suffering is morally acceptable, not whether or not suffering actually happens.
I still am in support of animal research. I just think that the system is more flawed than Golob suggests in his rosy write-up. Suffering happens. A lot. Let’s not try to hide that. To hide it would be dishonest.
Many meat-eaters fess up that that they are aware that their steak suffers. Animal researchers shouldn’t deceive the public either.
@59
You clearly have no idea what happens in factory farms.
You’re right that people anthropomorphize animals and make false assumptions about what causes suffering, or what an animal needs to be content. But animals in factory farms experience abject misery for nearly every moment of their lives. That’s not true of wild animals (or lab animals).
I my main concern for the ethical treatment of animals in labs — which, in my mind, means allowing them a decent quality of life and quick, easy death when we’re done with them — is that it be species-appropriate. It is almost impossible to use primates in research in a way that really satisfies their mental and social needs. Rodents are a lot easier to please.
I appreciate @67. An animal exhibiting those kind of stress/boredom behaviors (the backflips) is not in an acceptable situation. The chicken getting the injection? Depends on the pain involved. Chickens don’t know or care about their vital processes, in the abstract.
Anyway. People who are interested in this stuff ought to read some Peter Singer. It’s really hard to say why he’s wrong. A lot of smart people have tried and failed.
I’m from Alabama. I know for a fact that there are literally thousands of people in this country who hunt for sport and fun. There are also many hunters who hunt for food and to be a part of an ages old human tradition, which is respectable. But make no mistake, there are also many many many people who just think it’s fun to shoot things that move.
Death is a part of life. Torture does not have to be. We should not torture our food before we eat it. We should not torture animals to make hairspray and mascara. People should not keep pets locked in aquariums, cages, and apartments for their own amusement. But while I firmly believe that no creature can truly live if it is kept in a cage, it does seem that animals kept by researchers for medical purpose do not suffer, and are not tortured. The only crime against them is that they are not free to leave.
This is justifiable when it serves to end the suffering of multitudes. It is sad, but it is not *that* bad.
Moderation and respect are the keys: in any instance, do not take more than you need, and honor that which you do take.
We –humans, tigers, bunnies– none of us would exist had those that come before us not taken other lives to sustain their own. Even plants feed from the dead that fertilize the soil. None us us produce our own energy. We must kill.
Even though it is sad. It is not *that* bad.
Accept death as the natural end to all things. Focus your energies instead on reducing the suffering of those who still live.
Yes, it is hard to think of animals in cages being injected with things that make them sick. This is why we should be grateful that there are other people who are willing to do it for us, as we should thank the farmers who are willing to kill our food for us so that we may live without the discomfort.
Others must die so that you may live. There is no choice. Send complaints to god.
59- are you suggesting that animals “all the way up to primates” are happier in cages, are happier isolated from their own kind, are happier when prevented from acting out the full array of naturally selected behaviors, than they are in the wild?
please, stay away from animals. you’ve really got it all wrong. and i really hope that you aren’t among those doing animal research.
we can attempt to alleviate suffering as much as we can, and feel good about it, but suggesting that animals are better off in their little, little cages because there aren’t such things as predators is fairly delusional.
It’s simple:
we’re allowed to experiment on animals because they aren’t like us.
The experiments are valuable, because they’re like us.