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Animal Ethics

Our P. A. S. T. project aims for a cheap and specific way of targeting of peptide aptamers using E. Coli bacteria instead of animal subjects. This means that E. Coli bacteria can replace the animals that normally would be used for this purpose. It is not only a layman’s feeling that opposes experimenting on animal, but also from within the sciences there is a search for alternatives to animals. This implies that even the scientist has a gut feeling about the matter.

Experimenting on animals goes as far back as to the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE and the attitude towards animal rights has shifted a quite many times. The issue then, is the same as today. Can experimenting on animals reach a universal ethical justification or do we have to rely on particularism? What kind of rights should animal have? Choosing the universalistic approach means that we will have to provide some arguments that cannot be refuted, and make sure that these arguments could be applied to all situations at all times and at any place. The particularistic approach gives every single situation its “own” ethical code. That means that what is right in situation A, can be wrong in situation B. This seems at first sight as the most natural intuition, but digging just a bit deeper shows that its consequences is to radical and the boundaries between right and wrong becomes blurred. Through history many philosophers have joined the debate about animal rights.
The first philosophical rationalist , Renè Descartes (1596-1650), was certain that animals were mere machines without souls and therefor had no rights at all. They cannot feel pain and when they scream it is to be compared with the sound it makes when one breaks a stick or throws a stone into the water. A hundred years later one of the first proponents of animal rights came along, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Jeremy Bentham was utilitarian and meant that the most important criterion for having rights should be the ability to feel pain, and therefor the wellbeing of animals should also be considered. From the utilitarian point of view, an action is ethical correct if the outcome produces the highest possible amount of happiness overall. How to measure happiness is still a huge challenge for utilitarians.

Modern time

Now that I have sketched up two opposite philosophical positions concerning animal rights I will turn my attention to the present ethical approach. Today the general argument for justifying experimenting on animals is that opposite humans, non-human beings do not have the experience of the past and they do not expect their future. But that is problematic. Because if that is the criterions then why should we not experiment on brain-dead humans or infants? An argument can also be the fact that because we are able to control these animals they are of lesser worth than humans and therefor they can serve as tools for us. But this straightforward argument is also extremely conflicting with our view on our selves as caring reasonable beings. There is no bulletproof argument for why it is okay to decide that some animals are born in a laboratory, endures experiments its whole lifespan and at the end gets killed. The debate on experimenting on animals is not in any way an easy ethical discussion, but fortunately there has from scientific integrity sprung an initiative to find a middle ground. It is called the 3Rs; refinement, reduction and replacement. The Three Rs are ethical guidelines for use of animals in testing. These were first described by, W.M.S. Russell and R.L. Burch in 1959.

• Refinement refers to methods that minimizes pain, or distress, and enhance animal welfare for the animals used.

• Reduction refers to methods that enable scientists to obtain comparable levels of information from fewer animals, or to obtain more information from the same number of animals.

• Replacement refers to the preferred use of non-animal methods over animal methods whenever it is possible to achieve the same scientific aims.

Even though the 3Rs is widely accepted and the use of dogs, pigs, primates, cats etc. are decreasing, the overall use of animals in experiments are increasing. This is caused by an escalating use of mice and GM-animals. Experiments are being done to 100 million vertebrates annually according to British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, and it does not count invertebrates like shrimps and flies, nor does it count animals bred for research and then killed as surplus.

We can only hope that the success of our P. A. S. T. project really can support the process towards lesser animals in laboratories.