Porcher (2017), "Animal Work"

Jocelyne Porcher, “Animal Work.” Chapter 16, pages 302-318, in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies, Linda Kalof, editor, 2017.

• Besides the more obvious ones, working animals include “rats who detect landmines, vultures who find bodies on mountains, and cetaceans who help in climate studies [p. 303]”

• The notion of "natural behavior" for domesticated animals is misplaced. Effective animal workers need recognition, though this need is generally neglected. 

• “We owe an immeasurable debt to domestic animals that we do not seem to have any intention of honoring [p. 303]”

• Both abolitionists and high-tech folks (behind animal-free foods) are seeking a world without domestic animals -- are we trying to reject our own animal nature?

• Animal work can be mutually rewarding, and can co-construct our identities; for anymals, work is important, but it is not about production. Our pets work.

• Anymal activity (like beavers building dams) is not work (in the author’s sense) unless it aims to make the world more habitable both for the anymals and for humans (p. 307).

• Human or anymal work is not just drudgery when its outcomes are judged to be useful by the hierarchy and beautiful by peers – again, social recognition is central.

• Farm animal death greatly complicates the “working” lens -- a complication that doesn't arise in other sectors.

• In anymal work, humans and anymals must successfully engage in inter-species communication (p. 311).

• Affection is needed for successful animal work, but humans often need to keep affection in check.

• Cooperation (and hence confidence) is indispensable for successful anymal work; rules and their infringements are negotiated.

• The anymal capacity to co-create and alter the rules makes the work interesting for them (p. 313). 

• But work isn’t play, as one can always stop playing.

• Anymals understand when work is over (p. 314).

• Anymals want to give pleasure to their human partners, and vice versa – they like connection, it is a part of recognition.

• Better retirements for working anymals are a neglected element of recognition.

• Affection and death are the elements of (large-scale) animal work that are not a part of human work.

Brandon Keim in the New York Times (2023) on Lab Animals

 Brandon Keim, “What Do We Owe Lab Animals?” The New York Times, January 23, 2023 (updated, January 24, 2023)

• In debates, people tend to be "for or against" the use of non-human animals in research. But perhaps we could "give back" to research animals or their kin for their sacrifices. 

• That is, could we add a fourth "R" -- repay -- to the traditional three of replace, reduce, and refine?

• One route towards repayment (and one that sometimes is employed today) is to provide excellent conditions for animals after they have been research subjects, perhaps by placing them in sanctuaries or adopting them as pets. 

• For animals who do not survive their use in research, such ex post payback schemes are not available. Nonetheless, some research centers do memorialize animals who gave their lives in experiments. 

• And though the sacrificed animals cannot be compensated, aid to their living conspecifics -- donating to a sanctuary, for instance -- could be an alternative. 

• Another route (perhaps a subset of "refinement,") is to fund better living conditions for lab animals. "Some experts offered that a portion of drug revenues or research grants could be earmarked for this purpose."

• Subsidizing animal-free testing methods -- replacement -- might also be a way of  giving back, one that holds the potential to eventually end the exploitation of animals for research. 

Sonia Shah in The New Yorker (2023) on Free-Range Lab Mice

 Sonia Shah, “The Case for Free-Range Lab Mice,” The New Yorker, February 18, 2023.

• The subtitle is "A growing body of research suggests that the unnatural lives of laboratory animals can undermine science." [In an unwise attempt to appear more particular than The New Yorker, let me mention that I usually balk at the phrase "a growing body of research," for multiple reasons that will remain undisclosed for the time being.]

• This excellent piece of journalism opens with a tale of a 2006 false negative, where an experimental drug that was safe at high doses for rodents and monkeys proved life-threatening at much lower doses for humans.

• For new drugs, the FDA requires tests on (two species of) anymals prior to human trials. Most of the drugs that pass the animal tests fail for humans with respect to efficacy, while some prove toxic to humans.

• Most (some 88%), it seems, of the drug tests conducted on anymals cannot be replicated successfully; that is, it is not just psychology and behavioral economics that is facing a replication crisis.

• Lab experiments around the globe are undertaken on some 120 million rats and mice annually.

• More on replicability: the same animal experiment conducted in multiple labs can have different results. The results can differ based on the specific diet of the lab animals, their housing conditions, smells, the gender of researchers, … and just about anything else.

• For decades there have been efforts to produce genetically standardized animals, to ensure research results come with reduced noise from individual animal idiosyncrasies. This effort has not led to the expected research improvements: there is higher variance in drug effects with near-identical mice than with a broader mix. Further, there is lots of variance even among “identical” mice with respect to their basic physiology.

• The standard lab housing of rodents makes them sick, pessimistic, sleepy… "Imagine a study in which subjects are chronically cold, sleep-deprived, inbred, and held captive in cramped conditions. If the subjects were human, the scientific establishment would dismiss such a study as not only unethical but also irrelevant to normal human biology. Yet, if the subjects were non-human, the study could be treated as perfectly valid."

• Since humans are "free-range," it might be that the best animal models also are free-range -- and this thought has led to some researchers now testing lab mice that have been released in the wild, and comparing the results with their unfree brethren.

LaFollette (2011) on Animal Experimentation

Hugh LaFollette, “Animal Experimentation in Biomedical Research.” Chapter 29, pages 796-825, in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, Tom L. Beauchamp and R. G. Frey, editors, Oxford University Press, 2011. 

• The Common View: animals matter, but we (humans) can use them for our purposes when the benefit to us is significant.

• Lenient Views (animals barely matter) and Demanding Views (animals matter a lot) also exist – and for these, the potential benefits to humans are essentially irrelevant: the Lenient view allows animal exploitation for trivial human benefits, and the Demanding View forbids animal experimentation even for large human benefits.

• The Historical View was an extreme form of the Lenient View, one in which animals were essentially things, like rocks.

• Almost everyone now believes that it is wrong to cause an animal unnecessary pain, and that animal lives are valuable to them.

• For many people, these various starting points lead to a consideration of balancing costs imposed on animals with benefits to humans -- but some animal advocates suggest that such a balancing is unethical.

• The Argument Supporting Experimenting on Animals: (1) the research works, we can generalize from the anymals to humans; (2) animal experiments have been essential historically for medical advances; and (3) scientific methodology (controlled experiments and the need for “intact systems,” not just a hunk of cells) bolsters claims (1) and (2).

• There's an information bias: we hear about the seeming successes but not about the failures, the blind alleys we have been led down by inappropriate animal models.

• The similarity problem is the question of whether the animals condition is sufficiently like the human condition being examined. Given similarity, the inference problem is whether we can draw reliable conclusions about humans from the animal experiments. [These problems to some extent parallel internal and external validity concerns.] Much animal experimentation fails similarity or inference.

• When animal experimentation is presented as a choice something like choosing between the life or your baby and the life of your dog, the dog will not win. But the actual choice we are faced with is not between your baby and your dog – it is the institution of animal experimentation that is in the balance. 

• The harm we do to animals in experiments is present and real; the claimed benefits are down the road and uncertain. Maybe researchers have special obligations to those future humans down the road – but they also have special obligations to the captive animals in their labs.

• Would we use the “balancing test” in considering whether to experiment on nonconsenting humans? Isn’t this inconsistency a devastating counter to the “pro” case for animal experimentation?

• Speaking of inconsistency, there is the basic one of needing anymals to be similar to humans to scientifically justify experimenting on anymals, but not similar to humans to morally justify experimenting on anymals. [Peter Singer, for one, noted this paradox in 1973.]

• The fact that animal experiments might have value to humans is not in itself dispositive. More telling is the question of whether those benefits are procurable in ways that do not involve animal experiments.

Contreras and Rollin (2021) on the Disregard of Lab Rats

Elena T. Contreras and Bernard E. Rollin, “The Convenient Disregard for the Rattus Species in the Laboratory Environment: Implications for Animal Welfare and Science.” Journal of Animal Ethics 11(2): 12-30, Fall 2021.

• In nature, “rats live in colonies. They are very social and playful animals....[p. 13].” 

• Rats roam a bit, over blocks and neighborhoods; they forage and dig and burrow and climb and, frequently, stand up!

• Rats display a wide variety of emotions.

• Rodents dominate the US animal research industry, with tens of millions used for research annually.

• Rats bred for research are excluded from the Animal Welfare Act, nor are they counted in official laboratory animal stats.

• If we conditionally “accept” that rats will be used for research, we still want to know about (and control) the conditions under which they are kept. Their current living space typically is in a “shoebox” container, often with one or two rats, and is, of course, completely inconsistent with their natural range and sociability.

• The conditions under which lab rats are generally kept is bad for their wellbeing and bad for the validity of the experiments they are subjected to. “One might wonder how the rats feel about living in small rat boxes for eternity [p. 16].” The trend toward “enriched” environments provides little improvement for the living conditions of lab rats.

• “Satisfaction of telos leads to happiness” while “impediment of telos leads to unhappiness [p. 16].” (Five Freedoms and Five Domains (nutrition, environment, health, behavior and mental state) are indices of telos.) In research labs, “rats live in a constant state of deprivation of their telos and positive experiences [p. 18].”

• Just moving rats around, along with other types of handling, leads to stress and fear. Lighting and daytime experimentation are other sources of discomfort.

• The barren environment of lab rats does not reduce variance in behavior, it doesn’t make them more comparable or useful to science: Replacement, Refinement, Reduction – better lab rat welfare is also better science.