Now we’ve strayed far from leather vs. human skin. 
You said that the way animals communicate is less complex than the way we communicate and I’m saying that we don’t know that.
I don’t think you should ignore emotion but I think that more reason needs to be applied. It’s kind of like would you kill other people to feed your family? People who you think are inferior to you or just plain distant and irrelevant. But this example rarely even applies, because in industrialized countries we can live just as well, actually better, without using animals. If we stop using them we are not placing them before humans, we’re just giving them the respect they deserve as living beings rather than commodities. Animal research is debatable because you can argue that lives do depend on it but you can also argue otherwise.
A lot of times what has been proven to be safe in animals causes great harm to those who volunteer for testing. And we may never know how many great cures are discarded because they fail in animals but do work on people. So either way human volunteers will be used. Animal tests are almost irrelevant because what matters are the results of human testing. In fact, as I said, animal tests may prevent good drugs from getting to the market.
And we must not forget about the tons of useless tests that are done all the time. Like forcing dogs to smoke or forcing drugs into pregnant animals to observe the effect. These kinds of tests produce not only inaccurate and useless results, they also swallow up funds that could go towards helping people directly or conducting studies on people who already smoke or campaigns to educate women. Clinical tests are often useless but behavioral studies are just ridiculous. Stuff like taking baby monkeys away from their mothers to see how it affects them or sewing shut the eyes of kittens or sticking weird gizmos into monkey brains.
I think we do. With a great deal of training, the most intelligent animals can communicate in a way that is on par with a young human child, meaning that other animals can’t reach that level, and that past that early stage of development humans surpass the complexity of animal communication. You can not believe that if you want to, but if you want to argue it here some cites would help.
I’m not sure what kind of person you think I am here. I don’t think strangers (or anybody) are inferior or irrelevant, and I don’t think it’s okay to kill people just because I don’t know them.
Except for medicine, which is the only case in which I’ve actually argued in favor of it.
Can you? What are your arguments?
You’re making drug testing sound like a complete crapshoot. It’s not. When animals are used, it’s because the specific functions being tested are analogous to those in humans. Yes, neither is perfect. That’s why it’s called testing. What is the alternative? To go straight to tests on humans when the side effects or potential dangers of a drug haven’t been determined? That sounds like a pretty callous disregard for humans to me.
If you can find some convincing examples to back this up, please do. I don’t think you’ll find many because it would depend on the people doing this research being pretty darn clueless.
I’m going to do just that, in fact, because I’ve never argued in favor of them. But while we’re here, why do you get to decide whether a test is useful or useless? Because it sounds useless to you? We do need to find out more about ourselves biologically to cure diseases, deal with other problems, and just because we’re scientific animals. I hope you’re not suggesting we resort to experimenting on living human beings.
That’s the thing I don’t get. You say animal testing even for lifesaving drugs is unnecessary. Is going straight to human testing the alternative? There’s a reason these things start with animal trials, you know, and it’s not sport or cruelty.
No no no. It needs to be And what if our whole universe is just, like, a tiny molecule inside of an even bigger universe or something, man?
And you need to do it in a Dennis Hopper voice while gesticulating wildly.
Just because we’re not able to teach animals to communicate the way we do does not mean that they cannot communicate with each other in a different way that is equally complex.
The reason I mentioned sacrificing strangers for the sake of your family is because it’s almost analogous to sacrificing animals that we don’t understand for the sake of people whom we do.
Any successful test on animals is then done on humans. Animal research usually does not prevent human research. And in those cases that it does who’s to say that it hasn’t prevented a great breakthrough?
I don’t suggest we test on people (although we already do).
When I say useless I mean that the study does not prevent human suffering. For example AIDS research in animals is practically useless because first of all animals do not develop the disease the way we do and the living conditions of the animals hurt their immune systems, skewing the results. Progress has been made from clinical, epidemiological, and in vitro studies. Smoking doesn’t cause cancer in dogs, asprin is poisonous to cats and has no affect on horses, benzene causes leukemia in humans but not in rodents, insulin produces birth defects in animals but not in people, etc.
Even tests that have failed in animals are sometimes conducted in people anyway. It just comes to show how ineffective animal tests are in determining whether products are safe for people.
Activist is someone who works to take freedoms away form people via legislation in how they use private property, in this case, animals.
Because lots of folks can distinguish from right and wrong. You are confusing animal abuse stuff. There are no studies showing rodeo, circus, or game animal enthusiasts as more “violent” people. A kid going around mutilating neighborhood pets is more in the line with th violent stuff that you are thinking about. I get a kick out of how you include rodeo and circus in your abnormal and unhealthy activities. Many people that look down on game animal enthusiasts love those two things. I always tell them that they are next on the animal rights activists’ agenda. Your post makes that sing true.
I’ve been to factory farms, slaughter houses, rodeos, hunts with dogs, bullfights, and cockfights. I still don’t see how any grown person with any sense is appalled to the point where they have to take the freedom away from HUMANS that like the activities, make a living from the activities, or enjoy the product and/or prices from the activities.
At one point people who fought for the liberation of American slaves were also viewed as people who worked to take freedoms away form people via legislation in how they use private property.
People who attend the circus are not directly abusing animals, most likely they have no idea what they are supporting/watching. They think the animals are enjoying themselves. They are probably not aware of the intense confinement and cruel training techniques used in the circus just for the amusement of people.
People make a living off of child labor too, doesn’t mean that it’s ok. The only freedom taken away by taking animals out of entertainment is the freedom to watch suffering or the product of suffering. I guess it’s ok to use domestic animals in entertainment as long as training methods are not cruel and they are given proper care and exercize.
It is debatable whether meat is necessary in the diet of humans but it is no question that large scale factory farming is grotesquely unregulated.
Humans aren’t infallible, and the slavery of beings who have the same mental capacity as us and are in fact, of the same species, is a total fallicy. Besides civil rights activist were fighting for PEOPLE to have the same rights as other PEOPLE, whereas some radical animal rights activists want to fight to treat *animals * the same as people. That said, I think that Machetero confused activists with radical activists.
To answer the OP, which was Why do you feel ok wearing leather, supporting factory farming, going to the circus, and supporting animal experiments? Or why don’t you?:
I wear leather [shoes] because it’s fashionable and because most non-heeled, closed-toed dress shoes are made of leather. Yes, an animal died so that I could have my shoes, but it would have died eventually anyway. (I do, as Marly does, oppose the cruel processes of slaughtering animals, but that isn’t going to stop me from wearing shoes I am required to wear with my uniform.
I don’t necessarily support factory farming, given that the way it’s handled is cruel to animals, but I do eat meat. Why? Because protein is a basic part of my diet, and meat tastes delicious, is easy to cook, and can be bought already prepared. So I’m selfish, eating another animal because it tastes good, haven’t you ever heard of the food chain?
As for going to the circus, I don’t see why circus animals need to be rescued if they are being cared for and treated properly. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case. Fighting between animals is different, because it’s pointless violence used as a source of amusement for others and actually injures the animal for not good reason.
On animal testing, it depends. If you’re talking about applying makeup on animals, that’s pointless cruelty because it’s nothing a volunteer can’t substitute for. On the other hand, there’s a quote from a site linked to earlier that I feel is relevant here:
“To those people who say, My father is alive because of animal experimentation,' I say Yeah, well, good for you. This dog died so your father could live.’ Sorry, but I am just not behind that kind of trade off.”
** - Bill Maher, PETA celebrity spokesman**
My father died as the result of cancer. I would have killed my dog in a heartbeat if its death would have cured my father. This may be human emotion and attachment, but I have affections towards both my father and my dog, who was a gift from my father. If you wanted to weigh them objectively, you could think of it as so: my father was a psychology professor who taught others useful knowledge and had the authority to counsel others. My dog, on the other hand, does nothing but cause mischeif and requires daily care. Theoretically, my father would be the one who should live. This “objective” way of measuring things is rather screwy since it could be used to support all sorts of crazy arguments, but I think you get my gist.
Mia~Switch~Mia
Also, I forgot to say that animal testing for things such as cures for diseases is okay in my book, because killing one or two or a dozen animals to perfect a cure could save the lives of hundreds, a ratio that I can live with.
Mia~Switch~Mai
I don’t think mental capacity has anything to do with the right to live free of suffering but yea, some people go way overboard demanding animals get rights they don’t even need.
The cow on your shoes would not have died if you did not pay for it to be killed when buying the shoes. Pleather shoes are widely available although the styles don’t vary nearly as much. 
I know from experience how hard it is to give up meat. People have been doing it ever since they made fire. But I think if you can do without it, which most people can, that would be better for the animals (who suffer great abuse in factory farms), the environment (factory farms produce an enormous amount of animal waste), and even the economy (conserve water and land).
It is almost never the case that circus animals, especially exotic animals, are cared for and treated properly. The tricks elephants are forced to perform cause circus elephants to suffer from arthritis early in life. Their bodies are not meant for standing on their hind legs or on their heads all the time. In addition, you’re not going to get a huge elephant to do what you say without either taking it away from its mother and “breaking” it at a young age or beating it with a bull hook or electric shocker. All animals are kept in small cages or on chains when off stage simply because circuses travel and obviously can’t drag along whole environments. Polar bears suffer from heat. As in zoos, wild animals in circuses are prevented from exercising their natural instincts which causes them to suffer as well.
Using the same objective reasoning you could say it’s ok to kill a mentally ill person to save your father. But that doesn’t even apply here.
The sad thing is killing dogs is not going to save people who have cancer. Cancer in dogs is too different from cancer in humans. Whatever those tests come up with won’t be reliable information anyway and it will be tested on human volunteers to obtain relevant results. It could advance cancer treatments for dogs though, but that would be like killing rich people to save poor ones.
Oops! I meant it would be like killing poor to save rich.
Experiments on dogs led to the cure of “Blue Baby” syndrome which opened the field of Cardiac Medicine. Today, almost 2 million cardiac operations are performed each year, saving millions of lives. Were those dogs lives more important than the lives of millions saved by surgery?
The blue baby operation was used by medical authorities and animal researchers in the 1940s to convince legislators to maintain maximum funding for animal research.
Actually it is impossible to accurately repriduce human congenital heart defects in a dog heart so that the animal models did not resemble blue babies. Dog arteries differ from those of humans, the conduction system is different, as is the blood clotting mechanism. Besides, the thousands of animal experiments were a failure, only about 50% of the dogs survived. It’s as accurate as betting on tails every time you flip a coin.
Doctors devised the operation without the use of animals and it is different to that performed on dogs. The development of the surgical operation was achieved during an actual operation on a human.
New operations were later devised by Brock and another by Barrett and Daley neither of which used animals.
Should read "Actually it is impossible to accurately reproduce human congenital heart defects in a dog heart so the animal models did not resemble blue babies.
There is no evidence, not one bit, that animals communicate with each other in a way that is as complex as communication between human beings. There is considerable evidence to the contrary, however, in that animal societies are much simpler than human societies. They (the animals) simply have less to communicate about.
It’s not even almost analogous. It’s not even close. And, in any case, human society has always been willing to sacrifice strangers for the sake of family, or clan, or tribe. What do you think all those nasty wars were all about? Not that that justifies all those wars. But there is no analogy to be made there. This kind of stuff just weakens the cause of animal rights activists. It’s one small step away from the “cattle ranching is the same as the Holocaust” drivel that inevitably discredits the saner advocates for better treatment of animals.
I’d really need to see a cite from a good source before I would even consider the idea that animal research has prevented a great breakthrough. Sure, there are always dead ends in any kind of research, but even a dead end yields useful knowledge, in that the researcher knows then that a certain direction is in fact a dead end.
AIDS research in animals was not, at least in the beginning “practically useless” because the knowledge that animals do not develop the disease the way we do is in and of itself valuable knowledge. If animal research has shown that smoking does not cause cancer in dogs, well, then we now know something that may be at least potentially valuable about cancer, don’t we? Nothing you say argues against animal research (note that I don’t say “against animal cruelty” – that’s a different story).
And finally, let’s get serious about the word “right,” shall we? I have never read or heard a good definition of what a “right” is that does not involve a corresponding obligation, and I think we can all agree that animals cannot possibly have obligations. Seems to me that this necessarily means that animals can’t have rights.
This does not mean that outright cruelty to animals is an OK thing. Cruelty, whether to our fellow humans or to animals, is one of the nastier aspects of human nature, and it does not become us. We should, of course, use animals as necessary (as food, as material for research, as beasts of burden, as pets). We should do this as humanely as possible.
Most evidence about animal communication is pure speculation. It’s kind of like that story where the blind men try to describe what an elephant looks like.
I’m just saying it’s human nature to be more cruel to those we don’t understand because we sometimes assume that if we don’t understand it, it must be inferior. And it doesn’t matter whether it is some (supposedly) incurable insane person or a (supposedly) inferior being, people have a tendency to treat them badly because they don’t understand them so they think that they’re better. Exept we recently began to treat the mentally ill with more understanding because they actually look like us and some can speak our language. Since we don’t understand animals we begin to assume what is convenient, that they are intelectually inferior and therefore don’t deserve to be treated with respect. I’m not saying animals should be treated like people. I’m just saying they should be allowed to live as they please as much as that is possible without causing harm to people.
Doctors Starr and Edward almost discarded the caged ball valve as it killed all their experimental dogs. It was however successful on human beings. (A. Starr, “Mitral Replacement: Clinical Experience with a Ball-Valve Prosthesis”, Annals of Surgery, 154(4):740, 1961.) These kinds of misleading animal tests slow or even prevent progress.
Why do we need to put animals through the sufferings of smoking research when we’re trying to find out about the affect of smoking on people? How is the knowledge of smoking effects on dogs valuable? What would we do with that knowledge?
Animal research almost always constitutes animal cruelty. Animals are confined and subjected to pain and stress. They are lonely, bored, and frustrated. There aren’t even any laws protecting the welfare of research rodents, birds, or farm animals. Those protecting primates and other animals are weak and rarely enforced.
Giving the right to live free of unnecessary suffering to animals is not like a government giving rights to people in exchange for their obligation of compliance. As consciencious people we give them that right without expecting anything back. We give it to them because they leave us alone (mostly) so we should leave them alone too (mostly). We should use animals as necessary but the question is when is it truly necessary and how far are we willing to go in order to avoid using animals.
I wouldn’t say pets are used. It’s more like a partnership, at least with domestic animals. As for food, we don’t need them in industrialized countries. Especially foods like veal and foi gras. Experimentation, well that’s more complicated but some aspects are clear (ex. no justification for behavioral studies on animals since we’ve already established how starkly they differ from us in that department, same for cosmetics and a great deal of clinical research).
Which I think is faulty logic by the way.
We seem to be harping on the circus/rodeo angle here, but cockfights? Bullfights? How anyone could think these are okay is beyond me. Dogfights are okay too, I suppose. Sickening.