I was actually thinking of writing something along these lines. There were recently a few articles that showed up in my feeds on animals and research. A bit on Chimpanzees, a bit on trying to reduce the number of animal experiments and all that sort of thing.
Some of it's really interesting, both the science and cause it's really on the edges of ethics. I'm torn between protecting animals from experiments but also the need to do them. The problem with such discussions, especially with the public, is that the people involved often don't have any idea what's happening. I doubt many politicians understand what's going in the science and so there's not really a way for them to make decisions about it. The scientists, and presumably ethicists, at least know what their talking about. I had to do an animal ethics class for my degree and you have to get ethical permission before using animals as well as saying exactly why you need them and why you can't use alternatives, 'lower' animals and fewer animals. Of course there the problem becomes trying to use as few animals while still getting information that is relevant, otherwise the whole experiment is a waste.
Also most furs never seem to understand how far from being useful any of this is to them. You often see posts about making real anthros or transforming people but we really can't do anything like that.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
I was actually thinking of writing something along these lines. There were recently a few articles that showed up in my feeds on animals and research. A bit on Chimpanzees, a bit on trying to reduce the number of animal experiments and all that sort of thing.
Some of it's really interesting, both the science and cause it's really on the edges of ethics. I'm torn between protecting animals from experiments but also the need to do them. The problem with such discussions, especially with the public, is that the people involved often don't have any idea what's happening. I doubt many politicians understand what's going in the science and so there's not really a way for them to make decisions about it. The scientists, and presumably ethicists, at least know what their talking about. I had to do an animal ethics class for my degree and you have to get ethical permission before using animals as well as saying exactly why you need them and why you can't use alternatives, 'lower' animals and fewer animals. Of course there the problem becomes trying to use as few animals while still getting information that is relevant, otherwise the whole experiment is a waste.
Also most furs never seem to understand how far from being useful any of this is to them. You often see posts about making real anthros or transforming people but we really can't do anything like that.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~