Hi LJK

A line from an SF story about a stranded space-traveller finding other castaways and their alien keepers.

I think the PETA thing is a form of insanity, that somehow animals are as imbued with rights as humans. Yet do animals acknowledge anything like rights? To me higher animals are akin to humans in moral status, but they're not identical. We have irrevocably changed our commensal species - cows, sheep, pigs, horses, dogs and cats etc. They depend on us as much as we depend on them - our fates are inextricably tied together. To scream about experimenting on them to understand both them and us is just plain wiping away the common history between us. That they feel pain is without a doubt, but to say they're somehow intrinsically more important in the pain they feel rather than the pain a sick human might feel is contrary to any instinct they have in return. Dogs especially sympathise with us, but they're not able to abtract a Self out of their experience in the way humans do.

The biomedical researchers who do this kind of work don't do it out of sadistic reasons and they honestly try to minimise the harm to their subjects. Dogs have faithfully died time and time again for humans throughout history, but they've stuck with us.

Adam