For what it's worth, we kept pet rats for more than ten years, and I have seen the brightest of them perform mental feats I'm not expecting anyone to believe.
Spatial modelling is clearly a rat speciality. One female, the smartest rat I ever saw, wanted to keep a large piece of bread for herself. The door into the cage had other rats loitering, so she went on a huge detour to the back of the cage, obviously with a theory that there might be a door in the corresponding position there. There wasn't, so she went back, picked up the bread where she had stored it, just of sight of the others, and forced her way through the main door. Watching it, we could have no doubt whatsoever this was a thought out, reasoned plan. The route to the back of the cage was long, complex, not obvious, and never before explored.
On another occasion, she lied to us for quite a while, and was only caught out one night when I happened to see her at work. The food bowl was down to the least favourite bits, and she was systematically cleaning it out, burying the junkfood under floor litter. The moment the bowl was empty, she started banging and rustling to get our attention, look, the bowl is empty, I'm starving. I realised she'd had me fooled for several weeks where I hadn't seen any refused leftovers, and had mistakenly believed the battle of stubborn wills to be over.
For context, this particular study used a total of 4 rats.
The rats used in an experiment like the linked one (done in the UK) would have undergone a surgery with full anesthesia and sterile technique, with prescription pain meds provided during recovery, and daily veterinary oversight throughout their lifespan.
This procedure is of course not being done for the animal's benefit, but the level of medical care and oversight is quite similar to that provided a human who might need, for instance a deep-brain stimulator implanted.
Before any animals could even be ordered, the specific protocols used, (and even the decision to use rats, and the number allowed to be used) would have gone through a number of committees at the university, under national-level oversight, and subject to laws and regulations designed to negotiate exactly the tradeoffs we are discussing.
I guess I can see how a reasonable person could refer to this kind of treatment as torture. But every scientist I know who works with animals takes their responsibility to minimize harm to the animals they use very seriously.
There's a legitimate discussion to be had on this subject; and it is already happening. The use of animals in research has changed a lot in the past hundred years, and it will certainly change a lot in the future. I think it's important for folks on both sides to avoid demonizing those who see the issue differently. Believing that some animal research is worth the costs is not the same as having "no issue with scientists torturing [animals] en masse"--by the way I disagree with the claim that most people feel that way.
Some reasonable-seeming #s for the US in this blog post: http://speakingofresearch.com/facts/statistics/ . (Needless to say the # of animals used in research is dwarfed by, among other things, the # of animals eaten as food, killed on highways, or poisoned in the name of pest control.)
I was not referring to this particular study as torture (though one could argue it's still fairly unethical). Many other studies involving mice and rats involve extremely cruel and painful treatment.
... and then they were killed. The more we learn about other animals, the more tragic this process becomes. In this case, the benefit is a vague possibility for "some insight into what happens in the human mind during sleep." Not worth it.
Yes, 'used' is a euphemism for purpose-bred and then experimented on and then killed. I am not trying to sugar-coat this by mentioning the efforts made to minimize the suffering of the animals done as part of this process. It's a hard truth.
Unfortunately with basic science it's not so easy as saying: research that eventually benefits people is OK, but everything else is not worth it. To look at this particular study: they are recording from cells in the hippocampus, an area that experiences atrophy and degeneration in both schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease. There is a strong homology between rat and human biology in this area: anatomically, physiologically, and even in disease states.
If you want to say that animal experimentation is never worth it, then you have to be willing to forgo whatever future benefits to humankind might accrue from this research, and you have to be comfortable making this decision for everyone else who might benefit. Ethically, you should probably also forgo any medical treatment that was developed on the backs of animal research. (Though you will still benefit from the eradication of many diseases and herd immunity to others).
In terms of the scale and degree of suffering, and of ethics, I think there is much more clear-cut ground to be won in encouraging people not to breed and kill animals for food or sport, and in protecting wild animal habitat from ecological degradation.
Can you propose a means by which we can do many of those tests without rats?
I'm actually all ears on this one, because I don't like it, but the slaughter of millions or billions of rats is making real progress on several research programs, spanning research in to disease, the function of organs, mechanisms of embryology, genetics, and epigenetics, etc.
Stalling any of those programs has a real cost in human lives -- people die all the time because we haven't had 10 more years of research on what would've saved them done. Thousands of people. Millions of people.
There is certainly some frivolous animal experiments, but I think at this point in time, they make up the minority, and that most of what you're objecting to has just been morbidly set against a higher goal to most people.
So here's my real question: there's a cancer lab down the street for me; what animal should they intentionally give cancer to to progress their research?
Reasonable questions, valid points, no clearcut answers. Every country wishing to known as civilized should have strict - and I do mean strict - legislation on all aniaml experimentation. We probably cannot get around it yet, but every single instance should be controlled, monitored, and damned hard to get permission for.
My mechanisms for pain and suffering really aren't any different from those of a dog, a pig, a cat, or a rat. I don't remember offering myself up for even modestly unpleasant experimentation in cancer research, and may not have the rigtht to impose such unpleasentness on others.
Of course, I am a hypocrite like everyone else, happily consuming whatever medication I may need, without asking awkward questions about its history and origins.
My mechanisms for pain and suffering really aren't any different from those of a dog, a pig, a cat, or a rat.
The mechanism is the same, but the effect is very different. Other animals do not exhibit the anxiety about expecting or experiencing pain that humans do. While that does not justify putting animals in unnecessary pain, it does mean we should be careful not to anthropomorphize our reactions to pain (or anything else, for that matter) onto animals.
>Other animals do not exhibit the anxiety about expecting or experiencing pain that humans do.
What are you basing this on? If a mammal is exposed to pain, any stimulus similar to that initial cause of pain will cause anxiety and fear, just like in humans. They may not understand the cause-effect relationship of the stimulus as clearly as humans, but they certainly have the ability to expect and fear unpleasant stimuli.
>People don't say anything about the meat industry (okay, some of the vegetarian/vegan ones /do/), or that our cities are essentially organized to be large scale breeding factories for animals which we then massacre as annoyances.
I am a vegetarian. I do complain about all of these things. I am no hypocrite.
It's not a matter of emotions, it's a matter of ethics.
I was not talking to you specifically, and tried to qualify what I said because there is always that one, but I hope you can agree that you're in the minority of people I have this discussion with.
All the same, I do hold you in high esteem because it's a matter of ethics, for you.
It's a very difficult problem. As I said, obviously the intentions are good and the benefits are very clear. But still, it's an issue of ends justifying the means.
Decades and centuries ago, many intelligent and educated people would argue that experiments on humans (like the Tuskegee syphilis study) are for the greater good, even if it it's at the expense of some certain group. They would say the ends justify the means. Now, in 2015, very few people would say that.
I don't know if humans have the right to effectively (metaphorically) cannibalize other species in order to improve our own, just because we're more intelligent.
> They would say the ends justify the means. Now, in 2015, very few people would say that.
To be fair, I'm at least consistent in that I think human experimentation is prudent and should be done, precisely because I think it's unethical to stall some of the research questions it would answer.
Of course, we actually /do/ human experimentation, including experimentation we're not sure will work or which is not directly consented to by the human, moderated by the utility we get out of it and the risk to the human.
> But still, it's an issue of ends justifying the means.
What else is there to justify (or condemn) them?
We are but passing minds, waves cresting and breaking in a sea of chemicals. I view it as a duty to try and see as many healthy and happy minds as I can, and to be a net increase on that.
There simply is no reality except the one here, and our net impact on that all that matters. There's no cosmic tally after about how good you meant to be.
So while it would break my heart to, I would push down the plunger to kill everyone one of my pet rats so I didn't have to see so many skeletal faces in the children's cancer ward anymore.
> I don't know if humans have the right to effectively (metaphorically) cannibalize other species in order to improve our own, just because we're more intelligent.
At the end of the day, my views are really the emotional, monsterous ones: I simply value human lives at over a million rats to a human, so I'm willing to kill billions of them a year on the alter of saving those children. Once I have that valuation, the rest is pretty easy deductions about what allows the advance of research in the biochemistry.
So I'm curious: do you not regard the people who die through your inaction to be your fault? and if they are your fault, how many human children is a rat worth?
My sister used to keep rats and they erected a little barrier from cardboard in front of the food bowl because one of the dogs used to come over to watch them and they didn't like food that had dog breath all over it. Very intelligent for something so small and short-lived.
I think you are right on the money here, friend. Whenever I'm purchasing something online, I'm always curious how that transaction will take place... sometimes so much as just "test purchasing" the item to see what will occur if I actually decide to buy.
I think we already do this. The Wall Street Journal shows a brief purview of paywalled articles. And websites that have some conversion funnel constantly try to segment users into appropriate categories to better optimize the path towards payment.
Note that Demis Hassabis of DeepMind/Google is a coauthor on the linked study, they are actively working on integrating insights from neuroscience into their AI systems.
In my minds eye, I just saw a remake of Creature Comforts[1,2], where the dialogue was not from real-life interview with people, but from hn. Tech Creatures.
If we're going to get worked-up over meat, there's no reason to jump straight to dogs. Over 100 million hogs a year are slaughtered in the US [1], compared to about 25 million dogs worldwide [2].
