From: Andrew.Robinson@anu.edu.au
Subject: Re: Whale rights - Science and sentimen
Organization: Australian National University
Date: Mon, 24 Aug 92 04:07:09 GMT

In article <1992Aug22.020144.20873@nuchat.sccsi.com> kevin@nuchat.sccsi.com
(Kevin Brown) writes:
>In article <1992Aug21.030931.3837@newshost.anu.edu.au>
Andrew.Robinson@anu.edu.au writes:
>>Hi Kevin!
>
>Hi!
:-)
>[Kevin writes:]
>>>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.
>
>[I write:]
>>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.  
>
[Kevin replies]
>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?
>
Actually, I believe that it's been proposed.  And further, if you check out the
range of shampoos at "The Body Shop" (prevalent in Europe and Australia but
maybe not the US) you will find that none of them have been tested on animals;
this is also true of their other products.  I wash my hair with their shampoo. 
Why don't you? :-)

[extensive deletia which relied upon a negative answer for the last question]

[Kevin says]
>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.

An excellent solution.  

[Later, I said]
>>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."  

[Kevin said]
>Inasmuch as I have no idea what the goal of this was, I cannot say anything
>about it.

If you mean the goal of the experiment, it was to determine species difference
in temperature tolerance, as measured by water loss and other physiological
variables.

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


[Kevin replied, somewhat rhetorically]
>Would you rather determine whether or not something is carcinogenic by
>giving it to *humans*?  I didn't think so.

What we are doing _now_ is useless.

[Begining to sound like a committed green, I asked]
>>What _does_ that have to do with us and our physiology?  

[Biologically-informed Kevin assured me]
>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

Do you have sources for these assertions?

>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?

There is absolutely no guarantee that the results obtained by performing these
experiments on rats  (or _whales_ to satisfy those who wonder where the hell
the thread's going) are even relevant to human physiology.  The experiments are
corrupt in their design, their purposive nature, and their assumptions.  See
the paragraph immediuately following.

[Home straight now.  I said]
>>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?
>
[Kevin replied]
>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.

This will not prove it.  You are presenting alternatives, not designs for
establishing the adequacy of what is already done.

[From then on we agreed wholeheartedly]
>>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.

I agree with you entirely on these last two points.  Check out the Body Shop or
your local equivalent.

regardless,
Andrew

now hit d