While its sad that kittens had to be killed in this research, should the research find a way to stop the spread of the parasite, it would save many, many lives.
In medical research you actually have a board of people to weigh whether what they are doing is morally right, if the sacrifices are reasonable.
This is no different than using rats.
In fact, if we were to use intelligence as a marker of how much we should value some form of life, then this is more humane in a way since rats are more capable of critical thinking tasks.
And most importantly, this isn't a disease that could be studied by dealing with any other animal; toxoplasma is essentially the cat disease. We kill significantly more of other animals for the sake of similar experiments and yet you don't hear or probably care about them because they're not cute.
They where kittens bred specifically for this, it is no different then using lab mice. Sometimes things like this have to happen in order to better understand a subject, it isn't being done out of cruelty.
Bringing animals that people use as everyday companion animals into the world, just to destroy them later, is going to be viewed as messed up, no matter how you package it.
My gut reaction is "yes it is" but now that I think about it, just how much smarter than rats are cats? I did a bit of cursory googling and didn't find anything that had cited any meaningful studies.
At a certain point, your ideas have to be tested against reality.
It's admirable everyone is so against testing on animals, but prey tell, where are we going to test things in order to ensure they're safe for us? There's a limit to simulations, we need real world data quite often.
Same with cows, to be honest.
welcome to being Omnivorous.
If you are against killing kittens for medical research, you do not want to know what happens to rabbits and other animals in cosmetics testing and research, never even mind medical research. These cats at least suffered and died for the greater good, not trialing whether a particular formulation of skin cream or mascara is going to cause chemical burns or rashes.
It's sad that animals have to die for medical research, but it's more ethical to test on animals than it is on humans and the title is pulling emotional strings: KITTENS ARE BEING KILLED!!!
I bet you eat lamb at least once a year, article writer.
Hopefully you're vegan or that's going to sound quite hypocritical.
maybe the birds should get better at not being killed
A worthy sacrifice. Toxoplasmosis is an incredibly prevalent disease.
Yeah, people are culturally and emotionally driven which leads to a lot of hypocrisy.
A lot of cultures have quite different views on this. A lot of indians think we're disgustingly barbaric for how we treat cows, some muslim countries would laugh at our reverence for dogs, etc..
And being emotionally driven by your culture is fine, if someone offered me dog I'd be disgusted and would refuse, it's when you go beyond that and try to impose your feels on others without any strong moral reason that it becomes silly.
I have both as pets and I know it's anecdotal but my experience says they're about the same. Rats and cats both make wonderful pets with unique traits and quirks. It has also been demonstrated in a lab setting that they are capable of what might be empathy. Rats can be trained to do just about any trick a dog or cat can. They are also very affectionate animals. However the way they display this is not by wagging tails or purring. They brusk which is when a rat attempts to shoot the eyeballs out of their skull at you. It's very cute and alarming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f57HSjD_K8U
This is a stupid thing to ask because no study is going to run a comparison of 'how smart are rats vs cats???' like some kind of clickbait.
There are studies on rat intelligence and cat intelligence, and if you read them you'll find out that rats are increasingly adept at critical thinking and puzzle tasks, as well as social tasks that require them to work together to solve. Cats are definitely intelligent in their own right, but their ability to solve problems doesn't nearly have the breadth as rats'.
Nearly all chordates are incredibly intelligent and capable of doing many surprising things, but within them rats have shown an exceptionally similar 'level' of intelligence as humans. The things that make human society and ingenuity possible are there within rats, albeit at a simpler level.
I was attempting to look up studies of each animal individually, and I couldn't find any where the intelligence was measured with any unit that was comparable between the cat vs rat study (as in, the studies were measuring very, very different aspects of intelligence).
Uh, no? I don't think I said that.
I said that my gut reaction was that it was wrong because I assumed that cats were far more intelligent than rats, and then I attempted to find out if my gut was backed up with actual evidence.
Intelligence is never measured with units of any sort. The field of studying animal intelligence isn't animal psychology, it's behavioral ecology. What you do is you perform tests on well understood aspects of intelligence, such as personality (this is a measurable response), memory, , and different sets of problem solving skills (common experiments having crows get food out of a pulley contraption are a good example of this).
Its generally understood by behavioral ecologists and biologists in general now that chordates are far smarter than the vast majority of complex life on the planet. Of the chordates, rats are very intelligent and are generally more capable in a larger range of complex tasks than cats and display more complex social behavior, which is the basis for pretty much all of human achievement and arguably what makes us so 'smart'.
Also, cats aren't fully domesticated nor have really been bred to any serious extent like dogs, and dogs were originally bred as livestock from what we can tell, at least in China. Keep in mind wolves were domesticated multiple times independently across the world, so the origin of dogs is not really centered on any one place.
idk bout u but if you offered me meat of any sort I'd gladly take it, it'd be rude to refuse free food after all
Human meat
Aka the long pig
does dicks count
Or the number than a single shelter will have to euthanize in a year in any large city. This article is bullshit clickbait playing on the emotions of people that do not appreciate how routine this sort of thing is. It's not like they're smashing the kittens instead of using pentabarbitol.
someone went to the trouble of dying, all the more reason to
Wow, I'm very disappointed in them.
That wasn't NEARLY enough!
Sounds like we just found a perfect substitute to take their place.
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