lecture notes 7/17/01
Animal experimentation, contd.
- "Dissecting Peter Singer: Putting the animal rights guru under a microscope" by Adrian Morrison DVM, PhD
- He omitted important research
- Half dealt with studies on animal behavior and drug addiction.
- 1993 NIH budget: 11 percent to research on behavior, mental health, and addiction, compared to 37 percent for cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.
- These percentage translate roughly to the number of animals used in studying the problems.
- "Thus Singer shied away from picking on research that the public regards with greater sympathy than mental health and addiction."
- Sloppy citations
- A sampling of 49 of the 132 references for the chapter showed that 16 (one-third) were inaccurate or could not be found.
- Bait and Switch
- Were chimps really used in Air Force studies?
- They used rhesus monkeys
- NRC Guidelines (1996)
- The transportation, care, and use of animals should be in accordance with the Animal Welfare Act (7 U.S.C. 2131 et seq.) and other applicable Federal laws, guidelines, and policies.
- Procedures involving animals should be designed and performed with due consideration of their relevance to human or animal health, the advancement of knowledge, or the good of society.
- The animals selected for a procedure should be of an appropriate species and quality and the minimum number required to obtain valid results. Methods such as mathematical models, computer simulation, and in vitro biological systems should be considered.
- Proper use of animals, including the avoidance or minimization of discomfort, distress, and pain when consistent with sound scientific practices, is imperative. Unless the contrary is established, investigators should consider that procedures that cause pain or distress in human beings may cause pain or distress in other animals.
- Procedures with animals that may cause more than momentary or slight pain or distress should be performed with appropriate sedation, analgesia, or anesthesia. Surgical or other painful procedures should not be performed on unanesthetized animals paralyzed by chemical agents.
- Animals that would otherwise suffer severe or chronic pain or distress that cannot be relieved should be painlessly killed at the end of the procedure or, if appropriate, during the procedure.
- The living conditions of animals should be appropriate for their species and contribute to their health and comfort. Normally, the housing, feeding, and care of all animals used for biomedical purposes must be directed by a veterinarian or other scientist trained and experienced in the proper care, handling, and use of the species being maintained or studied. In any case, veterinary care shall be provided as indicated.
- Animal Welfare Act
Xenotransplantation
- Why use animals as spare parts?
- Current status
- limited clinical trials (pig livers)
- baboon bone marrow transplant
- companies begining to set up shop
- Frey's utilititarian argument
- see pp. 192-3, Frey, R. G. (1998) "Organs for Transplant: Animals, Moral Standing, and one view of the ethics of xenotransplantation" in Animal Biotechnology and Ethics, edited by Alan Holland and Andrew Johnson. London: Chapman & Hall. 190-208.
- moral status is a matter of degree
- "greater value thesis"
- value is a human concept (intelligence, morality, etc.)
- argument from benefit
- animals as spare parts
- certain infants, too
- arguments against
- animal welfare concerns
- primates vs. pigs
- Pigs are intelligent, too
- Ironically, it is precisely because people eat too many pigs, and have unhealthy lifestyles, that pig organ transplants are being considered. A large majority of heart, liver, and kidney transplants could be prevented if people reduced their meat, (and alcohol and tobacco consumption). We should ask whether it is acceptable to make pigs and other nonhuman animals scapegoats for our species' self-destructive behaviors.
- transgenic technology produces animals with " various painful physical abnormalities including arthritis, stomach ulcers, muscular weakness, defective vision, and weakened immunity."
- animals are forced live in unnatural environments
- dangerous and ineffective
- costly
- to treat individuals infected w/animal viruses (e.g., link to HIV)
- to test pigs for virus
- more expensive than human-to-human transplantation
- proposed FDA archive is costly
- distributive justice issue
- "Can we justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on operations that, if they ever succeed, would at best benefit a small minority of patients, while dramatically driving up health care costs for all?"
- limited regulatory procedures and potential for fraud
- environmental concerns
- can create deadly new viruses
- environmental pollution
- March 1999: a community in Sarpy County, Nebraska denied a permit to a xenotransplantation pig breeding/research facility because of environmental concerns alone
- water, soil, air
- disposing of animals
- Alternatives to Xenotransplantation
- policy recommendation from Nullfield Council on Bioethics
- "an undesirable but unavoidable necessity" and that "in the absence of any scientifically and morally acceptable alternative, some use of animals . . . can be justified as necessary to safeguard and improve the heath and alleviate the suffering of human beings". Not every benefit to human beings will justify the use of animals and, in some cases, the adverse effects on the animals will be so serious as to preclude their use.
- evolutionary relatedness between human beings and primates...special protection afforded to primates used for medical and scientific purposes. can be recipients of organs
- non-primate species should be regarded as the source animals of choice for xenotransplantation.
- the use of pigs for the routine supply of organs for xenotransplantation was ethically acceptable (intelligence criterion)
- the use of pigs for the routine supply of organs for xenotransplantation was ethically acceptable (small change argument)
- pathogen issues
- resource allocation
- major oversight