Psychoblog

the whole issue of animal cruelty raises its ugly head in the media every now and again. what constitutes cruelty exactly? where should we draw the line? in my line of work it’s something that is always there in the background. the research on acute stroke and drug treatments depend on the use of animals and i know various people who conduct experiments on rats and mice. much of the knowledge of exactly what happens in the brain after a stroke occurs has come from animal experiments; knowledge that myself and others base their work on. by the way, that’s the first time i have ever used a semicolon in a sentence and i’m not sure if it works or not.

i attended a talk by someone a while ago who described their work with mice. they reared the mice and spent a lot of time teaching them some simple skills. then they operated on the mice to give them a stroke and tested them to see how this affected their functioning. finally they killed the mice and cut out their brains for examination. nice.

so, anyway, i know the importance of experimenting on animals and to an extent i use the results myself every day (well, to an extent we all do), but it’s not something i can ever agree with. however you phrase the moral dilemma i am never going to believe it is right to subject others to suffering and death for our own gains. i think the whole superiority of humans thing is a weak argument. we don’t deserve our lives any more than other animals. this is an issue that you can’t compromise on though. you are either one side of the fence or the other and the two sides can’t really be reconciled. so i guess this is something that will go on and on forever and ever.