Dogs are a particularly useful model for heart problems in humans because they naturally get several of the same conditions and diseases humans do. You can try to create genetic variants of mice to have these conditions but it’s not nearly as good as a species that naturally experiences the condition. You may waste hundreds of mouse lives for poor quality research that way.
All studies involving animals require ethical approval involving a detailed assessment of the protocol by a committee that must include veterinarians, managers of the facility (not the lab members but outside of the research team), technicians who work directly with the animals, other researchers doing unrelated work, and a community member otherwise uninvolved in research at all. This is just for the ethical approval, they will also have to go through scientific merit evaluation by a different committee before this step. They must lay out exactly what they are doing and why it is necessary and how they are mitigating pain and distress. They may be under anesthesia for the entire heart attack, and then euthanized without waking up, or receive painkillers and be monitored constantly by a veterinarian. If they don’t do this, the work wont happen, and results wont be publishable either. Without being at that meeting we can’t know the exact technical justification, but there is a very strict process to follow and often everyone has more feelings about it when they are companion animals and they receive a lot of scrutiny.
I’m not all for animal research, some of it is poorly done and wasteful and doesn’t have any practical use. Or the data suffers from human incompetence. But a lot of it does help humans and animals. And there is a lot more tendency to intervene on pain and distress than you’d think - a distressed animal with no pain mitigation is not a good representation for your average human receiving treatment for something at a hospital. Your average local veterinary clinic almost certainly sees far worse cases of neglect and festering horrifying injuries and disease at the hands of incompetent dog owners than a study like this would ever produce.
I understand that, but all of that boils down to “trust the bureaucratic system”.
It’s inherently problematic that the justifications for animal research trials are not required to be publicly posted. If the justification is legitimate, you should feel comfortable defending it publicly.
Keeping it secret and gatekept to the scientists in the field means that the broader public has no real input or say on topics that are not just purely scientific, but deeply moral and ethical.
Virtually every scientist I’ve ever known has been a deeply moral person, but at a broader scale, there have been enough scientific studies that have been used to abuse people and animals, that their shouldn’t be a culture of ‘trust us scientists, we always know what the right thing is’. There should be a culture of open transparency and verification.
Also, if you are passionate and interested in this kind of thing, consider reaching out to a local institutional Animal Care Committee to see if they have a spot open for a community member! You’d have to sign a confidentiality agreement at this point in time but maybe you would find something like that very interesting. Many institutions have a stipend for the time spent attending meetings and stuff, it can be quite a time sink for just a volunteer position.
I absolutely agree. There is a push for more openness and transparency in animal research, it is a major initiative of the CCAC for rollout over the next 5 years. There is a lot of fear of animal rights activist groups and litigation or harassment from them that I think is generally unfounded - those incidents are pretty rare. Unfortunately, situations like this with Doug Ford only stoke the fear and protectionist attitudes that need to be broken down… now people in this field feel more targeted and scared and less likely to speak to the public. It’s very counterproductive.
There is a lot of fear of animal rights activist groups and litigation or harassment from them that I think is generally unfounded - those incidents are pretty rare.
I get the fear, but do also agree it feels unfounded. If farmers and slaughterhouses manage to get by, it seems like animal research labs should be able to too.
How is that fear unfounded when a politician can snap their fingers and target your research with this populist bullshit? There already is a process to ensure this research is justified. We shouldn’t allow political interference in science. It sets a horrible precedent and opens the door for worse. Ford’s actions undermine public trust in science, which is terrible (look south of the border).
Just because they develop the same conditions doesn’t mean that we will learn anything that will help humans. And even if it helped humans, you need to consider whether it is right to sacrifice any number of animals so that we can help John Everyman who fills his gullet with burgers and hot dogs, cheat death. Get him a gym membership and a nutritionist instead and invest the rest into building synthetic human bodies or something so we can do this research without a single animal death.
Research into building synthetic human bodies would be illegal if you weren’t allowed to test on animals first as the legislation currently stands. The laws on human medical trials often mandate this kind of testing. New vaccines, for example, must be tested on animals (primates) before they are approved by Public Health Agency of Canada. Whether or not that is correct or useful or justified is definitely up for debate, but we would not be able to pursue or utilize any of these advancements or medicines without first changing the regulations. That’s the place to start, for sure.
One thing is to prioritize human lives in a fire or an accident and another one is to torture an animal, a fully conscious being, with the same ability for sense perception as you or me, for the small chance that it might produce some kind of insight. More often than not it doesn’t produce anything useful, even if there are a few instances where it does. I’m not entirely against animal experimentation but it needs to be justified at such a level that there must be almost no doubt that it will produce the required data. If there’s any doubt, you need more research to prove that an animal model will reproduce appropriately in human physiology.
I don’t need you to explain to me that human lives are prioritized, I’m not a retard. I need you to answer why John Everyman who clearly doesn’t value his life enough to stop eating slop, is worth torturing thousands of animals so that we may win him a few more years of life?
I mean, I literally linked you the incredible medical advancements that have been made possible from animal testing and research.
It’s not just about giving John Everyman a few more years of life. I don’t think you even looked at the page I linked, it’s about organ transplants, antibiotics, insulin, anaesthetics, blood transfusions, and so many other things that have nothing to do with people who “don’t value their life” and instead can affect anyone and everyone and can literally extend lives of millions of people world-wide by decades.
You’re arguing for something that is already in place, it already does have to be justified where there is almost no doubt it will produce the required data.
But are you aware of all the literally useless experiments that have been conducted that have given us 0 knowledge about anything? Were talking easily billions of animals tortured for nothing, and often it is pretty common sense that we were gonna learn nothing. Often it is more about using those research funds for something, to collect data for the heck of having the data because it might be useful to someone sometime. I’m not entirely against animal experiments but you need to have, I’ll repeat, absolute certainty that whatever process or Illness you are trying to understand is replicable in humans perfectly. This more often than not is not the case.
For example I can see very clearly how organ transplant techniques may be learned from testing in nonhuman animals, it’s almost self evident that it will because even if anatomy is different the mechanics that allow it to be possible are clearly the same across mammal species. But things like metabolic diseases or toxins are entirely different because chemical processes are different across species. My argument would also be that the only animal that should be used are chimps, which many people will oppose because they think them “rational” as if we have conclusive evidence of the non-rationality of other species.
I’m not entirely sure that it is the case but if it is the case that that is how it is done then good. But I have my serious doubts seeing how beauty products are still tested on animals.
Dogs are a particularly useful model for heart problems in humans because they naturally get several of the same conditions and diseases humans do. You can try to create genetic variants of mice to have these conditions but it’s not nearly as good as a species that naturally experiences the condition. You may waste hundreds of mouse lives for poor quality research that way.
All studies involving animals require ethical approval involving a detailed assessment of the protocol by a committee that must include veterinarians, managers of the facility (not the lab members but outside of the research team), technicians who work directly with the animals, other researchers doing unrelated work, and a community member otherwise uninvolved in research at all. This is just for the ethical approval, they will also have to go through scientific merit evaluation by a different committee before this step. They must lay out exactly what they are doing and why it is necessary and how they are mitigating pain and distress. They may be under anesthesia for the entire heart attack, and then euthanized without waking up, or receive painkillers and be monitored constantly by a veterinarian. If they don’t do this, the work wont happen, and results wont be publishable either. Without being at that meeting we can’t know the exact technical justification, but there is a very strict process to follow and often everyone has more feelings about it when they are companion animals and they receive a lot of scrutiny.
I’m not all for animal research, some of it is poorly done and wasteful and doesn’t have any practical use. Or the data suffers from human incompetence. But a lot of it does help humans and animals. And there is a lot more tendency to intervene on pain and distress than you’d think - a distressed animal with no pain mitigation is not a good representation for your average human receiving treatment for something at a hospital. Your average local veterinary clinic almost certainly sees far worse cases of neglect and festering horrifying injuries and disease at the hands of incompetent dog owners than a study like this would ever produce.
I understand that, but all of that boils down to “trust the bureaucratic system”.
It’s inherently problematic that the justifications for animal research trials are not required to be publicly posted. If the justification is legitimate, you should feel comfortable defending it publicly.
Keeping it secret and gatekept to the scientists in the field means that the broader public has no real input or say on topics that are not just purely scientific, but deeply moral and ethical.
Virtually every scientist I’ve ever known has been a deeply moral person, but at a broader scale, there have been enough scientific studies that have been used to abuse people and animals, that their shouldn’t be a culture of ‘trust us scientists, we always know what the right thing is’. There should be a culture of open transparency and verification.
Also, if you are passionate and interested in this kind of thing, consider reaching out to a local institutional Animal Care Committee to see if they have a spot open for a community member! You’d have to sign a confidentiality agreement at this point in time but maybe you would find something like that very interesting. Many institutions have a stipend for the time spent attending meetings and stuff, it can be quite a time sink for just a volunteer position.
I absolutely agree. There is a push for more openness and transparency in animal research, it is a major initiative of the CCAC for rollout over the next 5 years. There is a lot of fear of animal rights activist groups and litigation or harassment from them that I think is generally unfounded - those incidents are pretty rare. Unfortunately, situations like this with Doug Ford only stoke the fear and protectionist attitudes that need to be broken down… now people in this field feel more targeted and scared and less likely to speak to the public. It’s very counterproductive.
https://ccac.ca/en/animals-used-in-science/transparency/institutional-transparency.html
I get the fear, but do also agree it feels unfounded. If farmers and slaughterhouses manage to get by, it seems like animal research labs should be able to too.
How is that fear unfounded when a politician can snap their fingers and target your research with this populist bullshit? There already is a process to ensure this research is justified. We shouldn’t allow political interference in science. It sets a horrible precedent and opens the door for worse. Ford’s actions undermine public trust in science, which is terrible (look south of the border).
Giving beagle puppies 3 hr heart attacks and then killing them gives science a bad name.
If you’re going to do animal research you should be prepared to openly explain why it’s necessary.
Just because they develop the same conditions doesn’t mean that we will learn anything that will help humans. And even if it helped humans, you need to consider whether it is right to sacrifice any number of animals so that we can help John Everyman who fills his gullet with burgers and hot dogs, cheat death. Get him a gym membership and a nutritionist instead and invest the rest into building synthetic human bodies or something so we can do this research without a single animal death.
Research into building synthetic human bodies would be illegal if you weren’t allowed to test on animals first as the legislation currently stands. The laws on human medical trials often mandate this kind of testing. New vaccines, for example, must be tested on animals (primates) before they are approved by Public Health Agency of Canada. Whether or not that is correct or useful or justified is definitely up for debate, but we would not be able to pursue or utilize any of these advancements or medicines without first changing the regulations. That’s the place to start, for sure.
It works the other way too though, it doesn’t mean that we won’t learn anything that will help humans.
Generally, human lives are prioritized over animal lives.
Firemen rescue humans from burning buildings first, animals secondary. There’s a hierarchy, it works the same in medicine too.
Unfortunately, animal testing and research has given us some of the greatest medical advancements in history: https://hms.harvard.edu/research/animal-research/what-animal-research-has-given-us
One thing is to prioritize human lives in a fire or an accident and another one is to torture an animal, a fully conscious being, with the same ability for sense perception as you or me, for the small chance that it might produce some kind of insight. More often than not it doesn’t produce anything useful, even if there are a few instances where it does. I’m not entirely against animal experimentation but it needs to be justified at such a level that there must be almost no doubt that it will produce the required data. If there’s any doubt, you need more research to prove that an animal model will reproduce appropriately in human physiology.
I don’t need you to explain to me that human lives are prioritized, I’m not a retard. I need you to answer why John Everyman who clearly doesn’t value his life enough to stop eating slop, is worth torturing thousands of animals so that we may win him a few more years of life?
I mean, I literally linked you the incredible medical advancements that have been made possible from animal testing and research.
It’s not just about giving John Everyman a few more years of life. I don’t think you even looked at the page I linked, it’s about organ transplants, antibiotics, insulin, anaesthetics, blood transfusions, and so many other things that have nothing to do with people who “don’t value their life” and instead can affect anyone and everyone and can literally extend lives of millions of people world-wide by decades.
You’re arguing for something that is already in place, it already does have to be justified where there is almost no doubt it will produce the required data.
But are you aware of all the literally useless experiments that have been conducted that have given us 0 knowledge about anything? Were talking easily billions of animals tortured for nothing, and often it is pretty common sense that we were gonna learn nothing. Often it is more about using those research funds for something, to collect data for the heck of having the data because it might be useful to someone sometime. I’m not entirely against animal experiments but you need to have, I’ll repeat, absolute certainty that whatever process or Illness you are trying to understand is replicable in humans perfectly. This more often than not is not the case.
For example I can see very clearly how organ transplant techniques may be learned from testing in nonhuman animals, it’s almost self evident that it will because even if anatomy is different the mechanics that allow it to be possible are clearly the same across mammal species. But things like metabolic diseases or toxins are entirely different because chemical processes are different across species. My argument would also be that the only animal that should be used are chimps, which many people will oppose because they think them “rational” as if we have conclusive evidence of the non-rationality of other species.
I’m not entirely sure that it is the case but if it is the case that that is how it is done then good. But I have my serious doubts seeing how beauty products are still tested on animals.