We should have lab rats in labatories

Thanks again to Con for the debate. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on rebuttal since almost all of Con's points this round are either rehashes of his old arguments, or literal copy/pasting of those arguments. My responses to those still stand virtually untouched. Just a few points here and there. First, Con accepts that he has the burden of proof. Hold him to it. Second, note that my response to his first argument wasn't solely focused on confusing rats and mice. I talked a lot about the importance of animal testing, and why lab-bred rats (Rattus norvegicus, the brown rat, is lab bred by Con's own R1 definition) are still more moral to use than other animals that have previously known freedom and would be born and live their lives in the absence of scientific research. The view that rats are somehow stolen is solely Con's assertion, as there are many commonly used legal avenues for purchasing lab rats and for breeding them in your own lab. [. http://www.criver.com...] Third, Con's now asserting that there could potentially be some form of cancer or Parkinson's Disease that could become infectious and somehow transfer from rats to humans. I don't think this is particularly believable considering that that's never happened and that there's no agent, let alone an infectious agent, that directly causes either one, but even if you buy that, all that changes about this research is that it's done in BSL3 or BSL4 labs, where dangerous diseases are prevented from spreading. Con dropped my response about biosafety labs, which are there specifically for this purpose. Alright, so with those out of the way, let's get down to business. Why are you voting Pro in this debate? Well, Con's locked himself into two potential avenues, neither of which he's been particularly willing to come down on completely. I'll explain how I'm winning in both scenarios. The first scenario, and the one voters should buy because he makes a point of saying that his argument wasn't meant to apply to mice, is that rats alone should be removed from labs. In arguing this, he fails to recognize that all of his arguments apply to other animals. Worse yet, many of them apply better to other research animals. There's no reason why we should grant the protections to rats that he seeks, and not to mice, pigs, dogs, and chimpanzees. Yet, since he's doing nothing to address the system itself, he's simply shrugging the research burden off onto these other animals. I've shown how this is worse by encouraging more, not less, of the same harms he presents. Best case scenario for him, his arguments are hypocritical, providing protections to one animal while leaving all others vulnerable. Worse case scenario, he's condemning other animals to yet worse fates, requiring widespread trapping of wild creatures and harming more animals that are closer to sentience while denying life to millions of rats. I've shown how rats are special with regards to their ability to advance scientific research, and why they're so broadly used. I've explained how what they contribute to scientific advancements is beneficial to humans as well as all animals. I've examined why humans should be preferred over rats (and all other life, for that matter), and therefore why sacrifices must be made for a greater good. The second scenario is that Con is actually arguing against all animal testing. While voters shouldn't buy this due to Con's regular attempts to avoid directly arguing it, it's actually worse for his case. He's provided 0 effective alternatives, failing to defend his human studies and robots alternatives. I've explained how both are completely untenable and how the former is actually less moral than status quo. That means that Con is actively seeking to condemn all of scientific research that involves animals to extinction, thereby destroying all future products that could conceivably end a range of diseases and disorders in humans and animals. By trying to protect a few, Con is condemning all. In either case, I've clearly explained both the faults in my opponent's case and the benefits of continuing the status quo. All of Con's arguments come to little more than broad appeals to emotion that ignore the basic harms of thinking with a bleeding heart. Lab rats play an integral role in what researchers do to advance the sciences, and to remove them from that role has the potential to do more harm than can possibly be estimated. Whichever scenario Con is seeking, he's risking far too much for what is only a nebulous good at best.