animal testing

[JessFR]

You're right, it does require that you believe plants don't experience suffering. And I don't.

They may try to stay alive, just as do bacteria, or viruses, but I don't think that means they can experience suffering.

To me, suffering requires a mind, and a mind requires a sufficiently sophisticated nervous system.

Now admitidly we don't have so great an understanding of consciousness and perception to draw an accurate line of exactly where a nervous system becomes advanced enough to experience suffering. But I think we know enough to make that determination with some forms of life.

Such as that plants, viruses, bacteria, fungi, none of them can experience suffering, and can be destroyed with no innate moral problem.

Humans and for that matter most, or perhaps all mammals can experience suffering. And inflicting said suffering is highly morally questionable.

And then you have animals like say, worms, ants, lobsters, etc, where it's very questionable if they can really experience suffering. I'm inclined to a err on the side of caution. But the point is that while there is life where it's unclear if they can experience suffering, there's other life where we can be confident that they do or do not.

And IMO. If an organism can experiencing suffering, it becomes an open moral question as to when it's acceptable to cause suffering.

 

[Shady's Fox]

@JessFR

Do you realise that nature is the first thing that Earth gave birth? mhm? I think not. All this technology.. yack.

 

[Yourbaker]

When I look at the body I regard as myself, it's made of billions of individual cells that are linked. Along with each one of those cells are between 100 and 1000 micro organisms living in conjunction with it. Although these micro organisms are not regarded as "me" without them I would die. Some of my cells that I regard as "me" act fully independently like my white blood cells, despite their lack of any link to my nervous system they operate as if by command and travel through blood vessel walls like an ambulance through traffic to the exact spot they are needed and suicide their existence to stop invaders that have entered my communal coral like body.

None of this activity requires my mind and most goes on without my consciousness feeling a state of suffering, still my body is very aware of it's suffering and is working tirelessly to protect itself, just like a plant or animal. Consciousness only operates on about 200 inputs per second while my brain runs with about 4 million inputs a second. Suffering is restricted to a tiny percentage of what the real pain could be, this allows for instances where a paper cut seems to hurt as badly as a huge gash.

Our suffering experience is our tiny consciousness listening to a small section of the massive organization of life we call our bodies, there is a volume control built in.

When I consider the disconnected and interconnected life forms that combine to allow my existence it requires me to either grasp a magical answer that humans are special or I can accept that there is a layer of communication going on at a cellular level involving all the other biologicals that exist with me that we can only see the results of.

There is no evidence that all simpler life forms are individual, there is some evidence that they are interconnected like a school of fish or a flock of birds. They operate as if there was a level of mind that we can not understand in some cases but not all and we can't pin down exactly how.

I see life, all life, as interconnected. Each layer built on the last. Humanity and most mammals seem to be individual in their minds. We have lost the evolutionary connection to each other that lesser life forms seem to have, or at least we appear to have lost it in regards to conscious interaction with the rest of life.

The question I see isn't really is there suffering since suffering requires consciousness but rather is there need for the death of a lesser life form for my benefit? All life including my own collection of organisms cling to life but are ready to die when needed. Consciousness is the godlike ability to make sweeping decisions regarding all life and how we choose to use it. Pain and suffering are a gift that helps us understand the weight of our choices on other life forms. We can consider the grass and how it feels to be cut every week just so it looks pretty, or other more difficult questions like animal testing.

From my conscious point of view I can understand there are times when it may be beneficial for all humanity for my life to end, perhaps I should be as careful in my decisions with other life forms regardless of their level of individual sophistication.

 

[Nicomorphinist]

Isolated tissues from animals which were humanely euthanised or died of old age, such as dog gut and so forth, have been used for a long time, especially in pharmacological research, and now I hear they are inventing combinations of microchips and isolated tissues, and as more and more is found out about human and animal physiology and more and more can be done with stem cells,, hopefully the kind of destructive animal testing will gradually become obsolete and not cost-effective. . . .