From: kevin@nuchat.sccsi.com (Kevin Brown)
Subject: Re: Whale rights - Science and sentimen
Organization: I can't see any in the immediate vicinity...
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 1992 02:01:44 GMT

In article <1992Aug21.030931.3837@newshost.anu.edu.au> Andrew.Robinson@anu.edu.au writes:
>Hi Kevin!

Hi!

[I write:]
>>So which do you value more?  Human life, or animal life?  This is the
>>question you must ultimately answer in order to decide whether or not
>>experiments on animals are justified.

[Andrew writes:]
>I find it hard to accept that the (to choose a well known example) forced
>injection of shampoo products into rabbit's eyes is justified, or even
>addressed, by an answer to your question above.  

Well, let's see...would you use a brand of shampoo if you had doubts about
its safety?  If so, would you be willing to volunteer as "guinea pig" to
determine the safety of a shampoo product?

I didn't think so.

Assuming, then, that this is the case, what would you have the shampoo
manufacturers do?  Go out of business?

Would you rather not wash your hair?

Or perhaps you'd rather use whatever currently exists, even though a
newer brand may go much farther than the current brand in solving
whatever problems you might have with the current brand?

You have three choices that I can see: you can experiment on animals to
determine the safety of new products, you can experiment on humans to
determine the safety of new products, or you can do without new products.

Well, if you favor the latter, you are certainly not constrained to buy
new products, are you?  That new products are coming out at all is due
to the demand for new products.

My solution?  Educate people about exactly what is involved in the
design, testing, and manufacture of the products they like to buy.
Then let *them* make their own decisions about whether or not the
tradeoffs are worth it.

>Likewise those reported
>recently at the 9th International Bat Congress in India in which the
>temperature of the environment in which several bats were housed was
>deliberately raised until "they breathed their last" (the touching little quote
>coming from the abstract).  The researcher's justification?  "Sometimes we have
>to kill animals in science."  

Inasmuch as I have no idea what the goal of this was, I cannot say anything
about it.

>Or the rats force-fed supposed carcinogens,
>proving that over feeding rats with [insert-your-fad-here] gives them cancer? 

Would you rather determine whether or not something is carcinogenic by
giving it to *humans*?  I didn't think so.

>What _does_ that have to do with us and our physiology?  

Quite a lot.  Many of the basic mechanisms that work in a rat also work
in humans.  Of course, humans and rats are not identical, so you aren't
guaranteed to get results that are directly translatable.  The only way
to do that is to experiment on humans.  Is this what you are suggesting
we do?

>Now if we could
>establish that human life _is_ improved by _some_ animal experiments, then
>perhaps this would justify that subset, or an acceptably similar subset of
>them.  But this is begging the questions :
>
>1) how do we prove it?

By either testing things on ourselves without having any prior idea whether
or not these things are safe, or by doing without the things that require
such tests.

>2) what is acceptable?

The answer to this is a highly individual thing.

>3) how much improvement justifies a set amount of suffering?

This, too, is something that gets a highly individual answer.  Why?
Because the answer depends on what the improvement is "worth", and
that is a subjective measure.

>regardless,
>Andrew


-- 
				Kevin Brown

			    kevin@nuchat.sccsi.com
			    kevin@taronga.taronga.com
Newsgroups: sci.environment