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[Question]
Should reducing government funded animal experiments be on the agenda for EA?
2 min readOct 29, 2022
16
Justin Goodman from the White Coat Waste Project campaigns to reduce government-funded animal experiments. In one post he writes:
White Coat Waste Project made national and international headlines in 2021, after our #BeagleGate campaign revealed a series of cruel and wasteful dog experiments funded with tax dollars by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Remember de-barking puppies? Infecting dogs with heartworm? Infesting beagles with sand flies? Injecting dogs with cocaine? Yeah, those experiments.
In another post he writes:
Consider the pandemic. Using government spending databases, White Coat Waste Project (WCW) was the first organization to reveal in early 2020 that U.S. taxpayer dollars had been shipped to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for dangerous coronavirus experiments on animals, which many experts believe caused the pandemic. WCW also found emails showing that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was concerned about these dangerous experiments as early as 2016. But, bizarrely, the agency allowed them to proceed anyway. Other FOIA requests also exposed that, early in the pandemic, close confidants of NIH leadership expressed concern that a lab leak may have caused the COVID-19 outbreak.
This suggests that the activities of the White Coat Waste Project might be good both for the cause of animal welfare and for the cause of biosafety. Neither Animal Charity Evaluators nor OpenPhil have evaluated the White Coat Waste Project. It might be worth putting more EA money into it because it helps with multiple causes that EAs care about. Having someone make the animal rights argument against gain-of-function research could be helpful to convince people who aren't swayed alone by the biorisk arguments.
The fact that the virologists didn't do the research needed to find out that COVID-19 is airborne early in the pandemic suggests that a lot of the current research dollars are misspent because they don't allow us to gather basic knowledge about viruses we need. If the virologists can't do their animal experiments anymore, they might do more research such as research on preventing flu transmissibility in schools by controlling the humidity. That might have been research that would have actually helped us during this pandemic instead of the research our virologists did that didn't help.
Recent success in getting a Republican Congressman to introduce a bill suggests that the White Coat Waste Project is able to convince at least some politicians. Republicans current opposition to NIAID leadership might result in fertile ground to get such animal protection legislation passed in the next congress if the Republicans take over.
Well, the number of vertebrates used for research each year is ~3 OOM less than the number killed for food, and farmed animals likely have it worse than animals used in research. So I guess you need to find some really strong interventions to justify spending on research animals. I'm not sure if this particular intervention passes that test, but if so it's probably due to the biorisk and not the animals?
(One mildly infuriating thing is that animal tests often don't produce useful knowledge. E.g. some are done for testing cosmetics, some of those that are done for research aren't published (¼ were published in one study I found), some of those that are published don't reproduce or transfer to humans. Some of that could still be useful ex ante, but I'd guess much of it isn't. Coincidentally, I recently revised my post on animal testing from last year.)
Why do you believe that farmed animals have it worse?
Farmed animals usually get killed in a way that's designed to be quick and minimize suffering. I would expect, that research animals that die death due to being infected with illnesses or toxicity tests generally die more painful deaths.
There's a lot going on here but quick thoughts:
Unfortunately, this isn't even close to true. As one example, see ventilator shutdowns.
This kind of suffering is normalized, like literally the American Vet Association is struggling to try to remove it from "not recommended".
Unfortunately, this form of killing is not at all the limit of suffering from killing on factory farms, and in turn, killing is not even the main source of suffering in factory farms.
As a digression, following up on this:
From the triple perspectives of basic logic/social reality/actual practice, "understanding suffering", especially past the bounds of "X", seems to me to be an obvious requirement for EA activity; i.e. no matter what your cause area or activity, it's important. Certainly if someone is a leader in EA and doesn't understand it, that person is not an EA.
Also,
That seems right to me. I think animals used in research often suffer terribly as part of the experiments they're subjected to, but otherwise have lives that aren't nearly as terrible (but maybe still net-negative). I think conditions in factory farms are worse if you look at the average over the animals' whole lives.
I'm not sure about the deaths themselves – I think research animals are often gassed (e.g. with carbon monoxide) after the experiment, which may be somewhat painless? It's probably still distressing, though.
Some of the above seems to paint a fairly idyllic picture of the life of animals in research. When considering the suffering of these animals, I think it is important to keep in mind that they are often "recycled" repeatedly from one experiment to the next and from institution to institution. Thus, a given animal's life may consist of years of suffering different types of experiments along with suffering associated with transport between institutions, often over great distances. All of this is followed by a death that may include suffering of its own.
It is also important to consider that many of the practices used on farmed animals were first tested on animals in research settings who suffered horribly as a result. Using the ventilation shutdown example cited above, many hens suffered gruesome deaths filled with prolonged suffering while the agriculture industry tested methods that would later be productionized on farms. Granted, the numbers of animals were fewer than when put into practice, but we shouldn't forget that animals used in research also includes farmed animals.
Oh, I actually thought most test animals were euthanized after the experiment. Do you happen to have any data or sources on this stuff?
You can look at APHIS inspection reports and see many incidents of animals dying for reasons other than euthanasia. A better source is NIH OLAW reports that you can obtain via FOIA. There's no shortage of research institute self-reporting of animals dying due to a variety of issues including starvation, dehydration, improper protocol, etc.