Essay talk:Against Animal Testing

repeating ikanreed's hot take

I firmly believe all of my points still stand, and to reactivate a discussion. None of the methods you describe would actually reduce use of animal testing.

• in vitro "Test tube" methods of safety analysis cannot identify problems that correspond with whole biology reactions. Test a chemical's safety on skin cells and it causes brain damage? Oops. My bad.
• "In silico" is a joke. There's no simulation that even remotely can approach testing the interaction of just 3 proteins, much less some superset of all life. This is an absurd solution, and will remain so for at least a century.
• "Consensual research" of drugs with unknown side effects up to and including death? You're a fucking murderer of poor people. Also it becomes much harder to control for the effects specifically of tested drugs when dealing with human beings with complex lives. You're undercutting the validity of the science putting even at least twice as many people at risk to reduce the p values to where they'd be with mouse models. How about intentionally giving some of the people cancer at all the same so we can have effective control group, who will then definitely die. That's a great idea, right? Murder. This is committing murder.
• Epidemiology is already done, and is useless for drug efficacy testing, because the experimental drugs are new.
• Mechanical models. You're fucking joking. "I'm gonna pour this ascyltlated benzene on this lump of steel and see how it affects its heart rate and blood pressure". This is a joke
• "physico-chemical methods", guess what's before the animal testing already. This merely establishes mechanism, and conjectured side effects.
• "mathematical models", once again, already done. It doesn't solve the problem of efficacy and safety.

The overall point I had which you glossed over the first time we discussed this is none of these methods are adequate for effectiveness and safety trials, which I contend are, without exception, a necessary precondition to subjecting human beings to experimentation. Your counter-argument of "they could be used to reduce them" have only the barest validity, as the case you are making in this essay is that it's morally unacceptable on a foundational level to do animal testing.

The alternatives you propose are not ethical resolutions to the very real ethical reason we have animal trials in the first place: experimenting on human beings is implicitly more morally outrageous than experimenting on animals.

The fundamental and intractable question of this debate, that no amount of current technology can overcome is: are you willing to kill a human being to save a mouse? If yes, then we're probably not going to see eye-to-eye, if no, then I think the technological and methodological concerns I raise here are serious fucking problems. ikanreed ^{🐐Bleat at me} 21:29, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Ah ikanreed, nice to hear from you. (You aren't by any chance keeping a watch on me, are you?)

As an aside, before we get started, can I ask if you have or currently do work with animals in scientific research on animals? I only ask because you seem to feel very strongly about this (I promise this is not to seek out some way to accuse you of bias)

"None of the methods you describe would actually reduce use of animal testing.".

Fine, you make good points, I'll remove it all when I get a chance. I do still think we should invest more funds into looking for suitable alternatives though. I also want to repeat 2 other things I said before about your criticism.

"Consensual research" of drugs with unknown side effects up to and including death? You're a fucking murderer of poor people ... That's a great idea, right? Murder. This is committing murder.". I meant more along the lines of consensual research whereby a person agrees to test a method that might cure them. For example if I was terminally ill with cancer and the doctors/scientists proposed to me a line of medication that "might" work to fix it, and then letting me decide if I want to try it knowing it hasn't been fully tested for certain yet. Personally, if it was my only hope I'd go for it.

*Mechanical models. You're fucking joking. "I'm gonna pour this ascyltlated benzene on this lump of steel and see how it affects its heart rate and blood pressure". This is a joke". Indeed, this is a joke, because that's not what I was talking about. This was in relation to using dummies instead of animals in crash tests and the use of human-patient simulators.

"The alternatives you propose are not ethical resolutions to the very real ethical reason we have animal trials in the first place: experimenting on human beings is implicitly more morally outrageous than experimenting on animals." - What do you mean by "implicitly" more morally outrageous? You have to give a clear reason why you feel that way. Did you read the parts of the essay where I responded to the complaints that "Humans are more important" and "We should be more loyal to our species"? Do you think anything I wrote was irrational? Stupid? Where was the exact point(s) my thought process went wrong? I need specifics here.

"The fundamental and intractable question of this debate, that no amount of current technology can overcome is: are you willing to kill a human being to save a mouse?". This feels slightly loaded, would someone who was against experiments on black people to find cures for white people have "been willing to kill a white person to save a black person"? Yes, but why won't we see eye-to-eye on this? Let me ask you, would you be willing to kill a fully cognitively healthy human being to save a human with a diminished mental capacity to the equivalent intelligence of a mouse? Would you be willing to kill a mouse to save a human with so little sentience that they have a less awareness and understanding of life than the mouse does? And if so, why?

RockyRob97 (talk) 23:09, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Veterinary medicine

How do you propose to test the efficacy and safety of veterinary drugs? Also, since the human drug industry is much more profitable and larger than the veterinary drug industry, many "human" drugs have been purposed for use on animals (tetracycline, penicillin, praziquantel, etc.). Would stopping all animal testing not lead to a massive slowdown on drugs for animals too? CogitoNotStirred (via telepathy) (talk) 19:16, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

Testing drugs specifically on animals to cure them of diseases they already have is not necessarily unethical, especially in cases where no other alternative can be used.

Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn't. The same way us not doing experiments on people with dementia has probably resulted in a massive slowdown of our discovery of treatments for it.

RockyRob97 (talk) 01:24, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

"Finally, this type of reasoning has been used throughout history to justify all sorts of discrimination such as [...] white people not caring about people of colour. "

This is actually a super racist line of reasoning, especially because equating us black people with animals (aka dehumanisation) has been and continues to be a thing racists do. I know you're not a racist (probably), but it is a racist argument nevertheless. Moon Sock (talk) 00:39, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

It's only racist if one starts with the assumption that animals don't matter, which in the case of this essay, I clearly don't make that assumption. It is not "a racist argument nevertheless", there is a very clear definable difference there. Juror8 (talk) 22:29, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

No...? Even if the intent is different, it's still uncomfortable because, again, peoples of thr world have history, and also because even if you start out in a different place you can still end up in the same destination. Moon Sock (talk) 08:22, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

You could argue that dehumanization has the sort of effect that it does because human beings do not value the lives of animals, so reducing the moral status of a ethnic group to that of a non-human animals tends to work in justifying cruelty solely because we deem non-human animals morally acceptable to treat cruelly. Most people don't feel a thing when they kill an insect, so it makes sense that in the prior pretext of genocide the future victims are often compared to that of insects, vermin, etc. Still though it's totally understandable to be uncomfortable with human beings being compared to a non-human animals for precisely that reason. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 05:23, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

That being said the following line in this essay treats speciesism as being "the same logic" as other forms of oppression which I don't think is strictly speaking true. One's ability to sustain themselves absent animal products is highly contingent upon time and place, meanwhile there really isn't any justification in terms of self preservation to be racist, sexist, etc. The morality of eating meat is kind of a relatively recent conundrum to consider. Centuries prior only certain geographical regions and cultures had the means to support sustainable vegetarian diets (India is a great example); but for most of human history being able to live a full normal life while being vegan was simply not an option (and that still the case for certain people living in this world hence why intersectional veganism is a thing). It was always an option not to be racist, so no....the logic is not the same. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 05:29, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Why are you bringing meat-eating into this? A speciesist defense is not usually given to defend meat-eating, it's more "food chain", "circle of life", "bacon", "B12", "ancestors", "desert islands", "lol who cares lmao" etc. You could be the biggest anti-speciesist on the planet and still come to a conclusion of "well all animals eat other animals so its ok for us too". This would not be logically inconsistent Juror8 (talk) 22:29, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

That specific point in this essay is about the speciesist justification for animal testing which is the most common defense of it. "It's OK to sacrifice animals for humans because humans are more intelligent than other animals". However, when presented with a human who has less intelligence than a certain animal, and asked if intelligence still matters then, all of a sudden it doesn't. Thus, clearly what people really mean is "It's OK to sacrifice animals for humans because humans are humans", which is moral worth based on group membership, which is every discrimination. Juror8 (talk) 22:29, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

I think the issue is that the essay has the unexamined assumption "humans are equal to animals and vice versa" and proceeds to branch out into logic threads with further unexamined assumptions, like, say, under what context are people of colour equated to animals. No wonder the stereotype of the racist vegan exists!

unexamined assumption "humans are equal to animals and vice versa" - I don't actually claim humans are equal to animals, I claim there is no trait that all humans have that all other animals lack, except having human DNA. I then claim that that having "X DNA" as the basis of moral worth is how all discrimination works, and since it is not justified in the others (and it's not) it's also not justified here. Juror8 (talk) 22:29, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Uh, no. That's not how "all" discrimination works. What about discrimination against, say, atheists, or leftists? What about discrimination against specific sexual orientations? Discrimination against vegans, or against unionists in the workplace? Casteism? None of these are related to DNA. (Though granted, orientation may be partially genetic but there's not a widely accepted explanation for the origin of sexual orientation) Moon Sock (talk) 08:12, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

I tend to not use superfluous language when I feel the context is sufficient to understand what I mean. For example, through all my writings on this site I tend to use term "animals" instead of the more correct "non-human animals" because to do so is just so long-winded and unnecessary. In this case, I used the term "discrimination" to specifically refer to discrimination based on physical form. I felt that this was clear from the fact I contrasted speciesism with racism and sexism as opposed to discriminations based on sexual orientation or ideology (admittedly, I did wrongly bring classism briefly into it, this was a mistake on my part and I will now edit it out of the essay).

So with that in mind let's try again with further clarification: I don't actually claim humans are equal to animals, I claim there is no trait that all humans have that all other animals lack, except having human DNA. I then claim that that having "X DNA" as the basis of moral worth is how all discrimination based on physical form works, and since it is not justified in the others (and it's not) it's also not justified here Juror8 (talk) 18:29, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

This isn't how it works, because intersectionality is a thing. You can't talk about discrimination of one type or another in a vacuum, because ultimately they all intersect and interact with each other. Moon Sock (talk) 22:08, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

Hell, just go on 4chan and see how much the whole "black people are equal to animals" rhetoric is still alive. I'm Afro-Latino and even I get this treatment from white Latinos. Moon Sock (talk) 16:04, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

If we are going to talk logical consistency and treat eating meat as something separate from speciesism then what does that imply about cannibalism? Surely it’s still speciesist if the moral acceptability of eating meat is based on “group membership” no? So isn’t the consistency there that it’s okay to kill and eat other people? You don’t have to per se even accept any premise about human and non-human animals being equal. Save the prion defence, because that applies just as much to eating beef as it does eating humans. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 23:18, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Assuming one was truly a total anti-speciesist, one would yes have to concede yes that (1) eating all animals including humans is justified or (2) eating any animal including humans is unjustified. The fictional person example I gave above would indeed have to settle for one of these and if they didn't they would be being logically inconsistent. Juror8 (talk) 18:29, 15 June 2023 (UTC)