Many people have a hard time condemning animal experiments because they believe it’s a necessary evil. They worry that research will stop for diseases that kill people and their children. So let’s talk about that today.
If we’re talking about examples of experiments in the twentieth century- we may think of the experiments Henry Harlow did on baby monkeys. Behaviorist Psychology from back then thought that showing affection to young babies was harmful, and that love between children and their parents was really just a side effect of the feeding process. Henry Harlow sought to demonstrate the opposite, by taking baby monkeys away from their parents, and giving them fake parents. A wire metal ‘mother’ which gave them food, and a cloth mother which provided them with comfort. Though they still went to the wire mother for food, they preferred the cloth mother. John Bowlby was able to demonstrate the exact same information several years before – without harming anybody. He did research by taking notes on institutionalized orphans from the war. His findings showed unequivocally that merely feeding a child without showing them affection was harmful. Later Harlow did other experiments to induce psychopathology in monkeys. First by providing them with fake metal mothers. These lowered to freezing cold temperatures, shook violently, or had spikes. Then, he started using real mothers. He made these mothers antisocial by raising them in isolation. They couldn’t mate normally, so they were tied to rape racks. When they gave birth, they abused their children, even smashing their skulls on the ground and smearing the remains.
Other experiments during this time were done by the military, testing the effects of nerve gas on monkeys. These monkeys were taught how to pilot a fake plane, after months of conditioning and electric shocks. Other experiments were done on dogs to induce learned helplessness. This is when you shock an animal, and make it impossible to escape. You do this several times. Then you shock the animal again and make it possible to escape, but the animal does nothing.
We continue to do learned helplessness experiments today. We also drip corrosive materials into rabbits’ eyes. We take other animals and shock them, or force them to navigate mazes and press levers. Other animals are left in hot temperatures, to observe the effects of heat stroke, and to see how long it takes for them to die. We test the toxicity of items by forcing animals to eat items that are poisonous or inedible. We observe the effects, and see how long it takes to kill them. We drip makeup, nail polish, floor cleaner, etc, into their eyes. We force animals to inhale cigarette smoke. Psychology experiments are among the most painful. We cut open the skulls of monkeys and plant electrodes into their brains, then test the effects of fear, sleep deprivation, stress, and various drugs.
Only a fourth of animal experiments done are published. The studies themselves show how painful the experiments are, even with the sanitized language and technical jargon. Animal experiments are mostly a tradition passed down to generations of scientists. Even scientists who didn’t particularly care for doing them had to do it for their PHD’s. Those who object are thought of as soft, or people in the field will say that the needs of these animals don’t matter at all. Because there’s a vested interest, research labs, and industries that breed animals or create animal testing equipment lobby our government very hard to not get rid of these. Animals are separated from their parents, and scream while being captured in the wild. This isn’t said to criticize science itself or to say ‘we shouldn’t trust experts.’ Rather, every field is run by humans who may have irrational, or less than scientific motives. Animal experiments are often bizarre, with results that are inconclusive, obvious, or unable to be translated in a way to help humans. A lot of animal experiments are done to satisfy mere curiosity. Science done to merely satisfy curiosity is good – but you need to make sure that the experiments you do aren’t harming anybody. Other experiments are mandated by the government, but aren’t beneficial to humans anymore, and we only do them because no one has bothered to change the laws. We’ve known for a long time that lye, ammonia, and oven cleaners are corrosive, but we didn’t repeal the laws requiring scientists to drip these into the eyes of rabbits until 1983. We also repeat old experiments because existing information isn’t easily accessible. If old files could be computerized, they’d be easier to access.
Toxicology experts consider it common sense that information about poison doesn’t translate well between humans and other species. We are similar to other species in a lot of ways, but we still have different bodies and differences in our nervous systems. Even creatures that are the most like us, such as chimps have very important differences. Lots of Animal Experiments are done for products that are nice to have but not needed for survival – such as cosmetics and makeups. But there are already thousands of these products – we would just have to release less new ones or we would just have to use ingredients that we already know are not poisonous.
In other experiments, animals are forced to inhale cigarette smoke. Lung cancer needs a cure too, but is it right to force a less intelligent animal to inhale smoke until they develop cancer, when those of us who choose to smoke do so knowing the risks?
For other types of cancer, experiments on animals have yielded no useful results. Potential cures for humans end up not showing results when they’re tested in animals, or things that work on animals don’t work on humans. Robert Gallo, the first American to isolate the HIV/AIDS virus, said a potential vaccine by French researcher Daniel Zagury, was more effective in stimulating antibodies in humans than in other animals. There has been no shortage of volunteers for study. We would only have to make sure volunteers understand what they’re doing, and there is no pressure or coercion to participate.
A lot of researchers can get funding for their animal experiments by simply relabeling it as ‘medical research,’ even if the experiments have little to do with curing diseases.
Research for developing new drugs is notoriously slow. Animal Testing actually slows us down because it is inefficient compared to our other methods. Things that test really well in other animals end up showing no results in humans, and potential cures for human diseases remain undiscovered because they don’t show results in non-human animals. There was a new drug in England called Opren, which was touted as a wonder drug for treating arthritis. It passed all the typical animal tests, but had to be pulled off of shelves because there were 3500 adverse reactions, and sixty one deaths. The most notorious example of a drug which caused unexpected harm was thalidomide. It was tested heavily in animals. Even after it was suspected to cause deformities in humans; tests done on dogs, cats, rats, monkeys, hamsters, and chickens all failed to cause deformities. Deformities didn’t show up until it was tested on a very specific strain of rabbit.
Animal Experiments are paid for with taxpayer dollars. Not only are they needlessly cruel, but wasteful, and they don’t produce useful results. These include experiments where animals are forced to ingest drugs like cocaine.
When talking about whether an experiment is ethical, we should consider whether something is an emergency, or just a matter of convenience. Do we just get some benefits, or are we actually averting something bad? There may be a hypothetical emergency where we have no other options, and hundreds of thousands are going to die unless we start bending our codes of conduct. But you should really think carefully about what other lines you are ready to cross. Is it okay to inflict that much pain on someone because they are less intelligent, more defenseless, or because they don’t know what you’re about to do to them? Especially considering you are doing it to a creature with a very different nervous system from human beings – and whatever test you do is going to yield you very little results anyways. Animals suffer when separated from their parents, they scream in terror when captured in the wild. Others are forcibly bred to create new animals for labs. Breeding animals are heavily mistreated and sickly. Animals show terror in the laboratories when they’re about to be tested on. Then they actually suffer during the experiments. We accept that there are limits to the pursuit of knowledge. That’s why we put strict limits on what can be done to humans. As recently as the nineteenth century, our society did experiments on orphans, slaves, and prisoners. It continued to experiment on prisoners and minorities in the twentieth century. So think about that the next time somebody says – ‘well, sometimes we gotta do bad things to get things which are good.’ No – we have many ethical limitations in science and this needs to be one of them.
Nowadays, we have new technologies and methods that make animal testing further obsolete. I’m going to talk about these in a different article. We also can study human volunteers. They have to fully understand what they’re doing, and consent without pressure or coercion. For diseases, we can study humans who already have them. Remember that Henry Harlow was studying love between parents and their children by torturing baby monkey’s, while John Bowlby got the exact same information several years before by studying children who were orphaned from the war.
There are some fields of science that may have legitimately been slowed down in the past without using animals. Even nowadays there might be some fields of science which could be slowed. But people are innovative. Necessity is the mother of invention. Who knows what methods we might have discovered for gaining knowledge if we hadn’t had such backwards attitudes towards animals in the first place? Examples of such attitudes involve philosophers like Descartes, who identified as a mechanist, which is the belief that non-human animals are all just soulless machines, and when a dog squeals in pain, it is just like the squeaking of a machine. He was so convinced of this that when his wife disagreed with him, he nailed her dog to a piece of wood. This set a bad tone later for Animal Experiments, which used to be done openly on the streets. Anyways, that tangent aside, nowadays, we have a lot of new technologies that allow us to get information easier than we used to.
Companies may want to make the switch away from Animal Experiments on their own; just because other methods, including new technologies are more efficient, and cost effective. But we also have to consider that legislators often ignore protests against animal experiments because they are overly influenced by medical, science, and veterinary groups. Since they don’t have time to gain expertise in these fields themselves, they listen to the opinion of experts – but these groups have a vested interest in keeping these experiments funded, and their advice here is unreliable because the question being posed to them isn’t a scientific question, but a moral one. Such groups lobby heavily in favor of animal experiments. Companies that capture, or breed and sell animals, or companies that create devices to experiment on them also lobby heavily. So there are multiple forces working against each other.
Next time, I want to talk about ethics boards, how to actually achieve change in a society dead set against ending animal experiments, and how we have achieved the changes we currently have.
Anyways, that’s all for now, have a good day everyone.