Animal Minds: Animal testing, emotion and why we do it.

Great Debates
1

For at least two decades I have been fascinated with National Geographic Magazine. I’ve read it cover to cover for years and I name reading NAT GEO as one of my favorite pastimes each month.

This month there is an interesting article on Animal Minds. The magazine highlights several species of animals from the famed African Grey Parrot Alex, to dolphins, elephants and border collies. They study their cognition and emotions and test their ability to solve and manipulate complex, high order tasks. It’s a remarkable article and it brings to light a lot of questions about animal testing. Now I’m not going t spout out PETA slogans, as I am one of their harshest critics and I completely deplore their tactics. They are basically a terror organization in my mind, so I’d like to keep the animal testing questions away from PETA folks and their nastiness.

I wonder how humans would react if they found that the animals they were testing had the same emtions we as humans had. I know this question is by-in-large hypothetical but would we continue to test on live animals if we found that they felt pain the same way we did. Or if they reacted to confinement the same way we do i.e prison inmates, hospital rooms etc…etc… I wonder if we are testing across different industries on animals who are depressed or neurotic. Are they just organic drones to be poked, prodded and killed?

What is your stance on animal cognition from your own personal interactions with your dogs, cats, wildlife?
What do you think about animal testing? Would you let a company test your cat, dog, snake, chinchilla?
If we can’t test on live animals what would we test on? Death row inmates?

2

I think it’s certain that animals can feel varying degrees of emotion. If you own a dog, demonstrating this is as easy as just coming home from work.

I don’t think it’s fair to call it human emotion, though. Emotions are tied to the brain, and animals just don’t have the same types of brains humans do. I think this is the position most rational people take, and it shows in how we tolerate animal testing. People don’t generally tolerate cruel animal testing that hasn’t and isn’t likely to produce any results. But, people also realize that testing animals in uncomfortable ways can sometimes make humans much more safe, and they’re willing to compromise on the issue.

3

Call human emotions animal emotions then. We are animals too.

4

Right, and animal testing is the same as human testing, only done by the scum of the earth.

5

I saw a crow solve a problem once. It was pretty cool, though it was one of those “you had to be there” moments.

I don’t really see much of an alternative to animal testing at this time, though I think it should only be done when absolutely necessary, and has humanely as possible.

6

It is just closer to human testing than you care to admit. I did not say it is the same. It is cruel.

7

  1. It’s likely that lab animals, with greater prevalence, live more carefree lives than they would in the wild. So while it may be true that in some cases, the animals are hurt, it’s not like they had an alternative. Watch some documentaries of wolves tearing apart live sheep.

  2. An article about animal intelligence is going to focus on the animals and tests which had the most impressive results. Finding me the world’s smartest dolphin has little to do with whether or not my fruit fly can remember or process information in any way that’s morally significant.

  3. It’s unlikely that in most cases, the animal realises that you are harming it. Consider the piping in ancient Rome, made principally of lead. The Romans weren’t aware that the type of metal they had chosen to transport their cooking and drinking water was poisonous. But it was a poison that acted so slowly that no one realised. Not knowing that they were being poisoned or that they had the potential to live longer, the Romans didn’t feel like they were being murdered, they didn’t feel like they were dying horrible gruesome deaths. To them it just seemed like natural death. Same thing here, to the lab animals they just think they’re normally sick. They can’t comprehend it as being anything different from what they could just as easily be experiencing naturally and so can consider it no worse.

  4. We eat animals.

  5. I would fully support legislation that granted equal rights to any item, animal or machine, that could measure up to an adult human.

8

So your saying we can test animals who have the equivalent rights of human children but not adults and that fruit flies equate to dolphins and romans were cognitavely the same as lab rat # 6?

9

Because we can. Because we’re curious. Because they are made out of meat… but not human meat.

Speaking of… why is it more permissible to test on a human convicted of a crime than an animal? If a dog kills another dog… does that make it more appropriate?

If hungry enough… and a dog and a human were both near death… I’m fairly confident most people would kill the dog for food - before killing the human, if they’d even do that. But I could be wrong…

10

I got my Ph.D. studying the physiology of cognitive behavior in monkeys. The animals were awake and doing some pretty demanding video game-type tasks. We measured neural activity by implanting electrodes while they did the task (using local anaesthetic; the brain itself does not register pain).

I had two arguments to justify it to myself.

(1) Practical: If we hope to understand how the brain works in a detailed way, there is no substitute for invasive investigation of the working brain. The more advanced brain function we’re studying, the more sophisticated the animal subject must be. Someday in the distant future there may be noninvasive methods for doing detailed studies of brain function, but it would require radical advances in the physics of electromagnetic radiation because neurons operate using voltage changes and those voltage changes can’t be accurately studied without recording them directly (putting a measurement device very near the neuron in question). There’s room for debate about just how invasive we need to be given known technologies, but there is no realistic alternative to the enlistment of animals without halting scientific progress.

(2) Ethical: We can never prevent our actions from killing other organisms. Antibiotics mean bacterial genocide, building construction slaughters countless worms, etc. Any line we draw between acceptable and unacceptable loss of life is therefore unavoidably arbitrary. Given that, the most reasonable place to draw an arbitrary line, it seems to me, is at the species boundary.

But on a gut level, it was not easy. I don’t intend to fuel PETA (any more than I already have), but I have always totally understood and respected the choice of individuals to avoid working on monkeys.

11

Now you’ve hurt my feelings.

Ethically, I don’t have much trouble with the idea of animal testing. To be sure, a lot of animal research is predicated on a certain degree of cruelty. I don’t think anyone can dispute that fact. But there just are not good alternatives to animal testing in most cases, unless you’re willing to accept an unbelievably high level of risk in vital products and services and/or a sudden stagnation of scientific progress. Neither is particularly appealing in my opinion.

The thing is, every day, I’m reminded that life is beautiful and complex, but also somewhat cheap. What we do to animals is little different than what animals do to each other. When a scientist performs a surgical procedure, animals are typically anesthetized or sacrificed in as humane a fashion as possible. When a predator attacks prey, no such allowances are made.

Finally, people should know that most researchers generally devote a great deal of thought to what they’re doing to animals and why they’re doing it. I’ve known several people who’ve moved away from animal research, and I myself have avoided working with mammals just out of personal discomfort. And there are incredibly rigorous oversight systems in place–you have to be extremely thoughtful about what you’re doing when working with animals, especially mammals.

12

Humans go from geniuses to vegetables. Can I pick the one I want.?

13

I should have emphasized this too. In my experience, animal researchers take their ethical obligations to the animals extremely seriously. That hasn’t always been the case, and I actually think that (the non-violent wing of) the animal rights movement has done some good as a watchdog. But especially when it comes to monkeys there is a continuous process of evaluating ways to improve the living conditions of the animals. I don’t contend that their life is better in captivity than it would be in the wild. But I do think it’s as good as it could possibly be given their role in the experiments.

14

My experience of animal cognition is that animals think very well in ways which have worked for them. If you want to control a predator, you must first classify yourself in its mind as not-prey, because that dominates how they think. If you want to control a horse, you must begin by controlling what it does with its feet, because that’s how they think. If you want to control a scavenger, you must control the resources it has available. Rodents are still opaque to me but we are working on it, lol.

Domesticated animals tend to be less resourceful in my experience but more flexible in the ways they can think, probably because less is riding on the decision.

And humans tend to think about things in terms of “like me” and “not like me” which is the only reason this problem is thorny. All animals do not think in this way but people sure do.

I think different things about animal testing in different contexts, just as I do about private ownership of exotics. The ethical argument against Billy Joe having a pet panther in his basement is in principle the same as the argument against the National Zoo having them, but I nevertheless have different opinions about each. Animal testing covers a lot of ground and I myself am opposed to some, neutral about some, and actively supportive of others.

They can have the stupidest parakeet ever to creep out of an egg in there, lol. No, seriously, lo these many moons go when I was involved in exotics I donated three wild cats of whom I was inordinately fond to the effort to map the feline genome and research into feline immune responses to certain viruses so I suppose I can say I would.

So long as there are no good alternatives, animals it is. I do think we should keep in mind that animal testing is now the gold standard but that does not mean it is problem free. I think we do need to keep trying to find alternatives, and an eye ought to be turned to the fact that entrenchment is not the same as effectiveness.

15

Very well put, both you and spazurek said a lot of interesting things about this argument. I appreciate it immensely. The idea of cognition is something that has been studied and studied ad infinitum and it quite well documented. Neural impulses for pain have also been studied, I don’t know about in rhesus monkeys but in smaller ones like tamarines - to see if the same area of their brain fires when responding to a stimulus as with the human brain. I worked with tamarines during my Phd as well, but we were looking at environmental cognition not “feelings”. Our monkeys were on loan from Roger Williams Zoo - not born and bred in a lab.

16

Don’t mistake intelligence for personality.

Human minds and consciousness are different from animal minds and consciousness.

To reference PETA, I read an article about PETA protesting cowpie poker (I think poker)- paint a field in a grid, release cows into it, take bets as to the square the cows drop a pie in first, most, etc.

They protested because it was “demeaning and embarassing to the dignity of cows.”

That’s anthropomorphizing cows. Cows don’t care if you watch them take a dump. Humans do, because we have a concept of self-dignity that embraces the concept of modesty regarding bowel movements.

Sure, animals can be “smart,” or solve certain kinds of problems. This doesn’t bestow full human cognition upon them, or human emotional needs. In my opinion, having been raised in the country, it is shameful and disgusting to project human feelings into other animal species, which have their own distinct emotions and perspectives.

As regards animal testing, it depends on the kind of testing, but I’d say it generally falls under two categories:

  1. Testing that they’re not aware of- testing that doesn’t register on them in their pampered existence.

  2. Better an animal than a human- loyalty to one’s own species, etc. If a dog’ll bite and/or try to kill me to protect another dog, I have no grief over a dog dying to protect another human.

Also, there’s this point:

Certain animals only exist for the purpose of testing. Lab mice, for instance. They’d never have become so numerous and prevalent without being deliberately bred for testing. If we didn’t test on them, are they even releasable back into the wild? So, we summarily kill them? You have to consider the consequences of your arguments.

17

No, I said that if you find anything of equal capabilities of a adult human, the same rights should be applied. Anything less is its own realm.

Human children, with all probability, are going to grow up into human adults. And so in real life, they receive basic protections and rights to allow them to mature. But, they don’t have the same rights as an adult (right to vote, right to consent to sex, right to drink alcohol or smoke, etc. Impelled to go to school, impelled to be the dependent of an adult, etc.)

Rules should be based on verifiable capabilities and potential capabilities, not on sweeping generalities and custom.

:confused: Where’d you get that?

I specifically was saying that they don’t equate at all. Shooting down all animal testing because you found one animal with impressive talents is silly. If you wanted to disallow testing on a particular species because tests were able to confirm that it had lasting psychological effects, that’s one thing. But saying that all testing on all animals is immoral makes the same amount of sense as finding out that Casu Marzu is dangerous to eat and so banning every single type of cheese in the world (cheddar, mozzerella, American…)

No, I’m saying that if someone is incapable of recognising something as harmful, nor will they ever, can it be said to be a bad thing?

Say that there’s an invisible, intangible bevy of intelligent, unaging, hot babes who would be your love slaves if only you could detect them, and all you had to do was say the magic word, “ookalakamochalatte”, five times in a row to make them appear, but you never discover this truth and die in complete ignorance, well then did you actually suffer a great loss in your life? You could say that the Great Creator who set up this situation was an asshole for not letting you in on the secret. But you could just as easily say that in end-effect it just doesn’t matter.

18

Ok, now this I understand, why couldn’t you have said that in the first place? :smiley:

19

But the person thinks, “Look, doggie loves me!”

All because the dog was responding to thoughts of, “Food-providing, dog massager has arrived.”

20

Exactly. It’s far from clear what emotion is. Is the dog approaching you a conditioned response? Or is it emotion? Or is it both? Is it enough that all tetrapods have a limbic system? Or does the fact that lower tetrapods probably lack a particularly complex consciousness more important than whatever emotions they possess?