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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Drugs and alcohol and other non-necessities generally are not free. So I am not sure how you’d fund those things or the partying, depending what that means to you.

    But if you choose to do that nothing would happen, society would support the costs of you having safe (although likely fairly frugal) housing, sufficient food, and medical care. There are already people who live that way but without the food, housing, or care; they may resort to crime to meet their needs (negative affect on society) or may just have such poor health that they require much more expensive care (already at the cost of taxpayer in capitalistic society) than they would have if they’d been able to access care before it became a dire emergency.

    Research generally indicates that capitalist societies already pay more to address the consequences of poverty than it would cost to provide those people with their basic needs in the first place.






  • Dogs are a particularly useful model for heart problems in humans because they naturally get several of the same conditions and diseases humans do. You can try to create genetic variants of mice to have these conditions but it’s not nearly as good as a species that naturally experiences the condition. You may waste hundreds of mouse lives for poor quality research that way.

    All studies involving animals require ethical approval involving a detailed assessment of the protocol by a committee that must include veterinarians, managers of the facility (not the lab members but outside of the research team), technicians who work directly with the animals, other researchers doing unrelated work, and a community member otherwise uninvolved in research at all. This is just for the ethical approval, they will also have to go through scientific merit evaluation by a different committee before this step. They must lay out exactly what they are doing and why it is necessary and how they are mitigating pain and distress. They may be under anesthesia for the entire heart attack, and then euthanized without waking up, or receive painkillers and be monitored constantly by a veterinarian. If they don’t do this, the work wont happen, and results wont be publishable either. Without being at that meeting we can’t know the exact technical justification, but there is a very strict process to follow and often everyone has more feelings about it when they are companion animals and they receive a lot of scrutiny.

    I’m not all for animal research, some of it is poorly done and wasteful and doesn’t have any practical use. Or the data suffers from human incompetence. But a lot of it does help humans and animals. And there is a lot more tendency to intervene on pain and distress than you’d think - a distressed animal with no pain mitigation is not a good representation for your average human receiving treatment for something at a hospital. Your average local veterinary clinic almost certainly sees far worse cases of neglect and festering horrifying injuries and disease at the hands of incompetent dog owners than a study like this would ever produce.