Humans kill animals for all sorts of purposes, including for food and to control vermin and the spread of disease. Unless you have an ethical objection to killing animals for any reason whatsoever, I don’t see the issue with dissection.
Dissection of animals for non-medical students
- Thread starter Nerys Ghemor
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I basically do.
Well, many animals. Not the cockroach that crawled into a recessed fan housing in my bathroom and is now beyond my reach to destroy, but not to hate.
Of course, that doesn't really count, since I place animals on a scale of intrinsic moral value based on sentience, sapience, urgency of protection and their own moral reasoning (shrimp are machines made for eating; elephants are practically people; a bonobo is worth more than the life of any human that hurts them; dolphins are vicious bastards). And I can accord differing levels of justifiability to different uses for animals:
Morally praiseworthy:
Pets or zoo exhibits--better than life.
Morally acceptable:
Slaves--more questionable, and treat 'em nice; I don't believe most animals care about the abstract notion of freedom. But I had to give up eggs (restaurant eggs, anyway), which is bullshit. Also control of disease, as you said.
Morally ambiguous:
Scientific investigation and professional training.
Morally indefensible:
Direct food source. Use as teaching method in general education cirricula.
Morally repugnant:
Killing or torture for fun or recreation.
Well, many animals. Not the cockroach that crawled into a recessed fan housing in my bathroom and is now beyond my reach to destroy, but not to hate.
Of course, that doesn't really count, since I place animals on a scale of intrinsic moral value based on sentience, sapience, urgency of protection and their own moral reasoning (shrimp are machines made for eating; elephants are practically people; a bonobo is worth more than the life of any human that hurts them; dolphins are vicious bastards). And I can accord differing levels of justifiability to different uses for animals:
Morally praiseworthy:
Pets or zoo exhibits--better than life.
Morally acceptable:
Slaves--more questionable, and treat 'em nice; I don't believe most animals care about the abstract notion of freedom. But I had to give up eggs (restaurant eggs, anyway), which is bullshit. Also control of disease, as you said.
Morally ambiguous:
Scientific investigation and professional training.
Morally indefensible:
Direct food source. Use as teaching method in general education cirricula.
Morally repugnant:
Killing or torture for fun or recreation.
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I know my lunch room monitors were sticklers for class participation.
Well I bolded the part of my post that I think is relevant. If they're not being killed (and raised) just so we can dissect them, I don't think there's a problem with dissection.
Well to give you an idea of what type of Hindu I am, one of my favorite meals is a cheeseburger.
I do hold animal life as precious, don't get me wrong. And I see it as a failing on my part that I'm not a vegetarian, though I personally don't see any restriction of animal consumption as a necessary part of being a Hindu. My issues with eating meat are non-religious.
Examining the dead body of an animal certainly raises no issues with my faith. I consider it science. My dad is a surgeon and deals with people's insides for a living, so that might explain some of it?
Tea and crumpets, haggis and black coffee.RJDiogenes said:Eh, I'm a writer. I think of twisted stuff like that. I think it's a great story idea.
What do you think Arthur Clarke, Iain Banks, or Warren Ellis would taste like?
The meaning of that is unclear. Do you mean “better than life in the wild”?
“Slaves” is a loaded word just dripping with anthropomorphism. What about dairy cows and goats? Or sheep raised for wool? Or work animals and beasts of burden? Are they “slaves” as well? How do you feel about horse racing?
FWIW, while I don’t necessarily agree with your moral scale regarding the treatment of animals, I can understand and appreciate the reasoning behind it.
Your moral scale doesn't apply equally on all animals. Some animals might suffer if they are forced to live in a closed space, others do not, some animals might love human interaction and training, others might find it painful and only do it because they feel forced. Some animals don't feel pain, so torturing them or killing them doesn't matter. You can't really ask the animals what they prefer, how they feel, and you can't always deduce it, so the scale is different for every animal, and you don't know which is which.
We probably have it right in most of the cases – in zoos, animals that need more space have more space, but not all zoos are like that,a lot of human-animal relationships work exactly like animal-animal relationships work, since animals can't talk to each other either, so what we do seems to be fine, but it's not certain where it is not fine.
So while I support the idea to improve the situation, especially when it comes to killing, I also think that the moral scale for these improvements should be based on more knowledge, and should not be rushed.
Fair enough; but short of limiting the sources of dissection animals to carrion, virtually no animal that is not a cat or dog would fail to raise that issue.
And cats and dogs raise their own issues anyway. They're not killed specifically for dissection, but killed because a species whose members average about one twentieth the size of a human obviously should not be allowed to approach a tenth the size of the human population.
Fair enough. My understanding was that it is not enjoined (although iirc orthodox Vaishnavites might be, or maybe just brahmins--I tried to look it up real quick and got a lot of contradictory information) but pretty universally considered "worse" than vegetarianism, albeit for some reasons which hold up to scrutiny and others which do not.
For what it's worth, lacto-vegetarianism isn't that hard. Veganism, that's hard (and in the present economy, almost certain to technically fail). That's why they reward you with superpowers if you go full vegan.
Well, there's certainly nothing wrong the examination part. It's the method of death which is of concern.
YellowSubmarine said:
Indeed, as I noted.
It's probably better to err on the side of caution. This is how we approach everything else, for example the standards of proof used in American jurisprudence to allocate guilt or liability.
scotpens said:
I wanted to make a Red Dwarf reference. But yes.
I could use the term "chattel property whose actions are manipulated to benefit the owner."
Anthropomorphism isn't unhealthy in small doses. For one, it's not necessarily inaccurate--animals display a wide variety of humanlike behaviors; for two, the emotional aspect of the animal rights argument cannot be neglected, since even the most enlightened self-interest would be loath to recognize a rights regime, only the dangerous aspects of animal exploitation, such as the ecological problems and economic externalities factory farming poses.
C.S. Lewis actually made an interesting statement about the human-pet relationship...he suggested that in a way, our interactions with them, provided it's a kind relationship, raises them "beyond their nature" and takes them beyond the potential they otherwise would've realized. Is that kind of what you're thinking, Myasishchev? (Besides the obvious benefits, in that humans and pets with proper care make each other happier and even measurably healthier?)
If a creature dies naturally, and was not killed simply to dissect...that does seem like a reasonable exception, and would probably be enough to supply college-level curricula. (And of course in the case of humans, consent must be legally given by that person for their body to be donated by science.) But the raising and slaughtering of animals just to be dissected by children...I have not seen anything that convinces me that's right.
If a creature dies naturally, and was not killed simply to dissect...that does seem like a reasonable exception, and would probably be enough to supply college-level curricula. (And of course in the case of humans, consent must be legally given by that person for their body to be donated by science.) But the raising and slaughtering of animals just to be dissected by children...I have not seen anything that convinces me that's right.
I'm in the pro-dissection camp, but I had a different question: Everyone else did this in high school? Where I grew up in north Georgia, we did the frog dissection thing in 7th grade. I also dissected a wide range of animals from a worm up to a pig in 5th grade, but that was part of a special education class. In high school, 10th grade bio (9th grade for me - I was on the advanced track) didn't have any dissection that I can recall. But in 12th grade, I took AP Bio and dissected a sheep's heart and a cow's eye.
We did one in middle school and another in high school. But then I was living in a different state each time.
The girls in your school were ugly too, eh?
No need to feel guilty. Planaria don’t have a central nervous system or anything that can be called a brain. I think we can be quite certain they don’t feel pain — at least, no more than plants do.
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I hadn't really thought about it, but I suppose it's conceivable. My pets are less aggressive or "evil" than you would expect wild animals to be.
Although my understanding is the current thought on the subject is that it's more like arrested development--for example, an adult domesticated cat, and particularly a neutered cat, is basically than a larger, stronger kitten, with fewer of the adult behaviors that would characterize a cat in the wild.
Fun fact: humans are domesticated animals too.
Depends on the species. It’s said that domestic cats relate to their human owners as a kitten relates to its mother, whereas a dog thinks of its owner as the pack leader.
Not domesticated enough, in many cases.
Which, as with most that C.S. Lewis wrote, is utter bullshit, and a vehicle for Christian apologetics.
I don't see how you can apply such a moral judgement on animal behaviour (even if you define it as quote-unquote "evil", and not really evil in the human sense).
I don't think the sentiment's totally ridiculous. At the same time, I'm willing to bet that Lewis was mysticizing more than is strictly necessary, and probably positing something a bit less mundane than the notion that the same economic surplus which allows humans to act with decency can have the same, if more limited, effect on creatures that base more actions on instinct than experience.
Depends on what metric you're using to judge morality; utilitarian morality operates perfectly well independently of any requirement for "free will." My cats almost certainly cause and experience less suffering than their wild counterparts, and I don't think it's disingenuous to suggest that has a moral dimension, even if we can pretty safely assume it's not due to any epiphanies on the part of the cats.
Have you ever seen a hyena eat a water buffalo alive? I think there's very solid ground for calling that an "evil" (albeit with handy scare quotes in order to distinguish it from the more conscious evils humans inflict on each other and other living creatures). My point is, if we accept any notion of animal rights, and ascribe moral value to those rights, it's uncomfortable to accept that animals are incapable of violating each others' rights and there is no moral value in them performing actions we'd consider absolutely abhorrent if a human were to do them.
I've actually given some thought to the prospect that, at some point of economic and technological development, humans may even actively seek to prevent or ameliorate natural predation amongst wild animals. I think it's a neat science fiction idea, anyway.
I wouldn't ascribe morality to most animals-- possibly a handful-- but I would certainly agree that domesticating, or civilizing, animals can raise them beyond their nature, just as it does with Humans. In both cases, it's all about opportunity and environment.
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