So I think people here need to be mindful of how much they don’t know about animal testing, how easy it is for the topic of animal testing to become inflammatory and how much musk-hate makes that even more likely.

Animal testing and experimentation is happening all over the place. And in such work accidents to happen, as with any surgery. And a common measure to prevent suffering is to euthanise. In fact I think euthanasia is prescribed so often that it’s controversial, but you should keep in mind that any animal experimentation setup is likely to have an intentionally antagonistic relationship between experimenters and animal carers and ethicists.

There are groups deeply and actively opposed to animal experimentation of any sort and will infiltrate and target labs and try to expose them any way they can. There’s a real chance that something like that is behind these revelations. Point is that it’s often not objective and misleads you into thinking the targeted lab is particularly bad when it’s actually just a selected target for political reasons.

All of which is NOT to condone animal experimentation (I’m a vegan for example). But you really should be mindful of how dumb media hype around this issue can be.

If you’re outraged for instance, when was the last time you ate meat and how well do you think that animal was treated both before it’s killing and even during? Better than the monkey in this story? Hell, when was the last time you ran over an animal in your car and did you really need to be driving at all? Did that animal die peacefully? Did you even realise?

How many benefits come to both humanity and animals too from progress from animal experimentation and is that worth some of the mistakes and suffering caused?

These are some of the better thoughts IMO, where musk hate is really not relevant here. From what I could tell from the article, it did not seem odd at all. If you care about animals, take the issue seriously and don’t make it about one very famous person who’s cool to hate right now. Animals, and humanity, frankly deserve better.

i don’t need to pass a purity test or stake out a moral high ground to recognize right and wrong.

no one does.

Not sure I understand you here. I wasn’t talking about purity tests. I was talking about the quality of the debate and public understanding of the general issue.

You can recognise this as wrong all you like but it won’t alter whether the broader dynamic between the media, the public and the various industries involved is mostly an uninformed and ineffectual circus that ends up not caring that much about animal welfare.

Also, if these experiments are so self evidently wrong but the meat/dairy industry is ok by you, that’s beyond a mere lack of purity, and I’d have to ask you whether the habits and pleasures of meat really are worth the suffering caused and whether you’re even aware of the sort of suffering behind the meat industry.

There’s not much to debate or understand. Anyone can look at a primate suffering and see the wrongness there. People need years of education and training to the contrary in order to reach the opposite conclusion.

I find it illuminating that you opened up with “oh gee, what purity test” and ended with “if you eat meat you have no standing to care about animal rights”.

Instead of convoluting the discussion, why not come right out and say what you want to clearly and plainly?

“if you eat meat you have no standing to care about animal rights”

Come on … you know what I said is more nuanced that! You’ve got standing … I’m talking to you about it!

And yea, I’m totally with one seeing “wrongness” in much of how humanity interacts with animals, whether they could personally do better or not.

Where we differ and maybe start talking past each other is that I think an article or incident like Neural link is a good opportunity to not just get sucked into some main stream media click baity outrage and instead think about the broader system and culture involved, where, as I’ve said, there’s a real enough chance Musk and his company isn’t especially evil but rather representative of a multiple industries.

The point about whether someone is regularly eating meat is that the meat industry is comparatively huge and something which forms a central and direct part of everyone’s lives … it’s where the majority of our relationship with animal welfare begins and ends and it’s the one that we can clearly think about, that we have personal stakes in and can easily investigate and do something about. Which means if you care about animal welfare, and don’t want to only engage in click baity online outrage, it’s the obvious place to start and have a conversation. Which, of course, isn’t to take away from what may have transpired in Neuralink.

Other than all of that … yea look, if you want to get upset about the monkeys but not even talk about the meat industry, then yea, you can have a point about the monkeys, but it’ll be, IMO, a relatively easy one and it will run the risk of actually ignoring the medical/scientific progress that might maybe depending on your ethics justify at least the idea of the experiment.

I’m not rejecting it though, or the validity of your stance on it … just trying to push for a better conversation.