A member of my family is an animal rights activist (a female
) I wonder when she watches someone close to her suffer if she will still disagree with research like this.
Well, here's a little rant
I think that there's plenty of room to support medical research while still being an animal rights activist.
That is, most of the things we sacrifice animals for aren't really that important, even from a research perspective, and the vast majority of animals which are slaughtered, are for food. I'm a largely unapologetic carnivore, but I still think the meat infrastructure in the industrialized world is absolutely deplorable. I believe that we should roughly double the price of meat in the US, even if that means moving away from it as a primary protein source. I put my money where my mouth is, in that when I buy animal products as a grocery item (including eggs), I pay two to three times as much for them as I would for the cheapest option, and for that price I get eggs from chickens which are allowed to be outside with 100' sq ft of space for themselves, and bacon from pigs that was grass fed on farms and allowed to go outside. Though I have no complaints about my resources, I am definitely not rich, and doing this does impose a limit on the amount of animal products I am able to buy.
That tradeoff is fine for me because I lived for much of my life around chickens and horses, I know that they can feel pain and terror in a way that I can empathize with, and I don't want them subjected to needless suffering on my behalf.
So, I would absolutely support animal testing of a tinnitus drug even though it means doing pretty terrible things to some animals, and if it were my job to personally perform that terror, I'd like to think that I'd be able to do so. But, I try to be realistic about this.
I get that lots of people who consider themselves to be animal rights activists are not particularly realistic about this, but I think that's okay: the people who profiteer from chickens as a bulk commodity, for instance, also do not have a very realistic view on the suffering involved (and if the CEOs had to personally push the button and watch while each batch of unwanted male chickens were crushed to paste while still alive, I sort of doubt the current paradigms would continue, but sometimes I underestimate cruelty).
Anyway, I'd just encourage you to not paint rights activists with a wide brush. I believe that there is room to advance the state of research for serious conditions, while also advancing the comfort of the average work animal in the country.
I brought up the idea once of a small trial to repeat the Rivolta model, women on the page started complaining about animal rights etc. I was in shock. In time I came to realise that many sufferers don't really want to recover, they have already given up and accepted their fate and just like to keep other miserable folk company, its very sad. But I think if we had enough male contributors we could still get something off the ground.
I also find this statement a little objectionable as a male, because you seem to be implying that men on the whole are more willing to mete out pain and suffering. Please don't paint
me with a wide brush, either.
Also, I'm making a value call, that for me the well being of another animal is not as important as my own. The end result of that kind of thinking is unpleasant and messy, and therefore having a balance to that viewpoint is essential to not spiral into really hellish things. That is, I think it's incorrect to suggest that people who do not share this viewpoint "do not want to recover"; perhaps they simply do not put a higher value on their own well being over the well being of an animal, to feel that the tradeoff is worth is. That's a personal moral decision. Things die all the time, it's the way of the world, but having something sacrificed on one's own behalf is something which is less and less necessary as technology marches forward, and if some people are more content to suffer themselves than to have vivisections performed in their name, that's their own business.
I would seriously challenge anyone to go watch vivisection and slaughterhouse videos for a couple hours straight, and not at least reflect on these issues in a new way. Do you know the terror and pain you experience when you feel stuck with your tinnitus and unable to escape it? Have you ever seen the terror and pain in another mammal while its life is ended in a way which is brutal, messy, and not especially fast?