Recognizing Animal Suffering and Pain
Lab Animal, (Oct 1992, Vol 21, No 9). Also, Humane Innovations and Alternatives, (1991, Vol 5)
A major breakthrough conceptualization about animal pain and suffering incorporated by NIH:
“The research community has increased its attention to animal pain and what animals feel, but the barriers to accepting and dealing with animal sentience and the psychobehavioral position of the experimental animal subject remain great. As a psychologist, I spent many years studying and synthesizing the principles of animal behavior, learning, and experimental research in psychology, physiology, medicine, and related disciplines…”
Why I Am Not An Animal
From Dr Mroczek’s collection of essays entitled The Psychology of Human Life: An animal feels pain. And terror. And many of the chilling reactions we as humans understand in being sentient beings. Many animals are born similarly to us in process. And of those subjugated and experimented upon, none inclines towards the prison and hell of a laboratory over the field of nature. The pain of physical invasion and the abuse of life is an immediate ethical event is perpetrated suffering…
Animal Suffering by Experimental Design
Animals have few laws and poorly enforced laws to protect them against human mischief. The pain of physical invasion and the abuse of life is an immediate ethical event / is perpetrated suffering. Animals feel pain…
Answer To Persons Defending Animal Research
Philosophical assumptions about animals, animal pain, and sentient life are explained. A basic premise is that suffering matters, no matter by what or whom and that sanctity of life should be a guiding principle. Animals are powerless against human exploitation. Our decisions cry out for moral scope and a human ulterior purpose to be compassionate and kind.
Thoughts to consider…
In response to organ transplant “research” on baboons (1993)
…It would be beneficial for us humans to spend time locked in a laboratory environment to appreciate this horror, including the rage. We could experience the stress of having people leave the laboratory at the end of the day and on weekends and then hear the human steps return to do their experimental acts on us. We could experience that whatever is the human aim, it is physically and emotionally devastating to us and we can do nothing about it…
Re: chastising the condoning of the use of animals for “research” (1990)…
Put at abeyance questions of psychology, medicine, health. The research community is eager to resonate such need. These are a topic completely separate and distinct from animal suffering. These are not moral questions. The moral question is defenseless animal pain and doing unto other life as one would not have done to oneself…
…Sacrifice cannot be made of that which is not ours. Sacrifice can only be made of one’s own skin…
…Technology, including production useful to human psychological health, is commercial gain, an economic megalithic structure. Money is the price and cost…
…For science, for pure science, we must stop without further reluctance and willful obeisance to conglomerate privilege the carcinogenic and behavioral life circumstances which lead , eg., to cancer and stress…
Reasons for the USDA, Congress, and other government agencies to keep working for greater animal welfare improvement:
…There is tremendous agony and pain to living beings whose fate it is to be incarcerated and “used” for research. Science is not a religion nor is it a law unto itself; there are rights and feelings of sentient beings.
If you would be so kind as to ponder strenuously the human predilection to slacken vigilance and quintessential decorum as much or more in the laboratory as anywhere else in human practice for expediency, because of freedom from liability, as a matter of well documented callousness, and as a matter of overriding motivation for research result achievement supra-ordinate to concern over the welfare of a living creature. The living creature is obtained for one’s disposal without obligation to its life and without the restraints of knowledgeable social pressure to enforce conformity to the public wellspring of human sentiment for decency towards life. This is what we need.
Put yourself in the predicament of the incarcerated woe begone animal. Can you find compassion and justice for God’s own creatures selected to live anywhere else, could they but be free to choose, than at the hands of someone who, no matter how merciful in thought, will perpetrate an act and living condition positively inimical to the welfare of its hapless victim…
Logic for Congress to appropriate funds for monitoring and enforcing animal welfare:
…A human world enfolds its differentiating, enabling characteristics when a human group stipulates, registers, and observes proprietary willful conduct of human beings toward all living beings.
Animals live. Logic is the be fittingness of life to live in accordance with the needs and wants of sentience. Animals live with sensory nerve endings. Animals feel: heat, pressure, severance, chemical precipitation, decay, cold, crowding, immobilization, deprivation, instinctual motivation and biological niche, secondary association of stimulus control of researcher, laboratory, and incarceration. The distinguished comparison of animals to humans disposes grisly animal fate at the hands of human researchers. Sensation is sentience. Sentience is the hallmark of existence…