Edit: Surprised at all the vegans in this thread. I didn’t think there were so many of you. I’m glad you care so much about animal rights, that you’re willing to forego eating them and using products made from them. If you’re not vegan and have moral objections for this, maybe you should look at yourself first and all the animal abuse you sanction by eating animals and using animal products. Did you know dairy cows have to be pregnant to produce milk? They’re artificially inseminated throughout most of their lives. I hope everyone complaining about this also complains about ice cream and cheese. Or else they would be hypocrites who just want to blame others but never look at themselves.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s fucked up to experiment on animals who can’t consent to this? We place so much emphasis on people being the most important thing in the world, we forgot that we are part of the ecosystem too.
This is and will always be small potatoes in terms of the suffering we put relatively intelligent animals through every day.
We would need to slaughter probably 100,000 animals yearly for the US organ demand (at ~50,000 transplants per year and a buffer).
We slaughter 125 MILLION pigs in the US for consumption a year.
Not to mention that “medical grade” pigs will probably be given a golden ticket in terms of care until they are slaughtered, compared to the extremely abysmal environment millions live in today.
If animal welfare is important to you, scientific research is a poor use of advocating resources while we still eat hundreds of pounds of meat yearly. If advocates reduce meat consumption by even a percent or two it would generally greatly outweigh banning animal based research entirely.
Sure, but the article isn’t about the inhumane treatment of our industrial meat production facilities. I’m well aware of them. And I want those gone too.
Good thing you’re not consuming or using animal products, then. Or else you’d be a hypocrite.
Always with the you can’t participate in society and criticize it argument. It’s pathetic.
I mean, you can participate in society without eating meat. Lol.
Unless you were talking to someone else?
You can’t tell anyone to stop eating meat if you eat meat
Edit: Or else you’d be a hypocrite
Sure I can.
Animal testing isn’t ideal but for important medical advances, animal testing is the only way to demonstrate safety before human trials. At some point, you have to value the life of a human more than mice.
And some of the testing is fun. Like when they give them a buzzer to get more drugs. Lab rats definitely consent to more cocaine.
Confirmed, cocaine is lab rat approved.
I don’t value a humans life more.
Then maybe we should eat you instead of the pig!
Mmmmm, longpig
I will never understand how wanting to treat intelligent creatures with dignity is controversial.
Seriously? Who even talks like this…
It’s not controversial, most people think it’s stupid. Controversial would be if so many people agreed with you that it would polarize the society. Which you might think is what happens, but it’s really not.
Most people know that a human’s life is more valuable than an animal’s and think you guys are a little crazy. Treating them with dignity is fine by me, but pretending they’re on the same level as us is not.
It’s not stupid just because you think it is. Doctors also used to think that washing their hands between surgeries was unnecessary.
Point is, just because I value live in general and don’t think humans are necessarily more valuable than anything else doesn’t make it crazy.
I’m not saying it’s a universal truth, you may have noticed I used words like “think”. To me you guys are crazy and I think it’s very stupid. But I never claimed it’s a universal truth.
Surely you must have some system for valuing certain forms of life over others, otherwise functioning is not really possible given the reality we find ourselves in. For example, pretty much anyone at some level values the lives of humans or more intelligent animals over the lives of, say, mosquitos, cockroaches, flies, etc, but those insects are animals too after all. (And while one certainly might put some value on some insects, I know if I find a ladybug inside I’m decently likely to try to take it outside without hurting it, I’ve never met anyone who would get as worked up about a dead bug as they would a dead cat, or put the same effort into saving a spider that they would into saving another person from a deadly situation. Clearly, the value of such animals is at some level held to be less.) Even further, it would be even more strange to value other living creatures as much as humans, like plants or bacteria (indeed, considering that one involuntarily kills countless bacteria just by existing and must consume plants to live, a hypothetical person who cared just as much about them as people would either have absolutely no regard for the lives of others, or would be consumed by constant guilt to the point of probably being unable to survive in the long run). Clearly then, just about everyone has some sort of hierarchy of what animals are more valuable than others, whether one consciously believes it or not. If intelligence is the metric that one uses to decide this, then one must value humans more than any known animal, because while some are smart, no animal is quite as smart as humans are. If intelligence is not the metric you use, then what is?
Alternatively people who don’t value other people’s lives may have a personality disorder (emphasis on may). Of course that is if it’s not to sound edgy on the internet but if they truly don’t value human life.
It’s interesting that you bring this up because I have been encountering people lately who have a different take on insects - that they actually kind of put insects above humans. Just yesterday someone responded to me saying I get attacked by bugs that, quote “You are not getting attacked. You just live in the same world like them and take up space that once was theirs before”
So like its my fault that I’m getting bug bites. Humans are to blame for existing in the wildlife and that’s why animals and insects try to take people out all the time.
There’s this popular poster on tumblr who goes by bogleech - their stuff gets reposted to reddit last I saw. They also support this idea that bugs are superior and humans need to just stop being afraid of insects and respect them more.
Feel free to volunteer for testing then.
Not even the hot ones? Hot people are pretty valuable.
I mean, you’re probably not the only one who thinks anything.
That said, do you eat meat? If so, the meat and dairy industries systematically do egregious things to millions of animals every day.
Dude if I can preorder a whole pig with a replacement set of lungs too ….
Dinner and an upgrade?
Bacon and breathing
I limit my meat consumption, and I don’t drink milk. Not a 100% vegetarian, but it’s better than nothing. One of these days I’ll decide to be a vegetarian again.
So, you’re eating meat and being all hypocritical about others.
Do you eat cheese or other dairy products?
We are, but being a part of the ecosystem doesn’t really mean much. Ecosystems aren’t obligations, authorities, sources of morality or subject to it. They’re just systems of relationships between organisms in a particular place. Whatever humans do, as long as it involves other organisms, that is our role in the local ecosystem. If we start doing something else, we aren’t forgetting our role in the ecosystem, no role was ever assigned to us, our “role” is merely descriptive of what impact we have.
It’s just another version of the food chain
It’s definitely fucked up. It reminds me of the WKUK breakfast pig sketch.
Yeah, but you see; the animals are useful in a new way so ethics doesn’t matter. We’ll worry about that in 50 years when we no longer need them to grow new organs for us
I would see a million pigs die before one human.
That’s basically the attitude that is resulting in the 6th mass extinction right now.
Pigs are in no danger of extinction.
And wanting to preserve natural ecosystems does not imply wanting to improve the treatment of livestock. Incidentally, the end of meat consumption would most likely lead to the extinction of multiple species of livestock.
We brought pigs into existence for the benefit of human conditions, we will take them out of it if and when it becomes necessary.
How many pigs would be too many? What is the precise pig to human exchange rate?
I agree. We should be experimenting on prisoners.
Well that’s just insane.
I agree. We should be experimenting on schoolchildren.