F'ed up if you ask me. Imagine that being done to you by an alien species.
Funny you should say "alien" - I watched "Under The Skin" recently, and then read excerpts from the book. Without spoiling it, the fate of human (males) in the book is far, far worse than in the film. (Search "vodsel processing" if you want to find out more).
Finally made me become vegetarian.
LOL, how is that comparable at all...
The closest thing would be chimps or dolphins and we don't eat either.
Only Isserley speaks English because she's been trained to do so.
So it's directly comparable.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/prairie-dogs-language-deco...
I'm still not going vegetarian though.
I'm against whales and dolphins being kept in small area confinement. But I could hardly care about a crab being bled.
The only concern is on the survivability of the species and the effect on the greater ecosystem.
This is very rational and I don't see anything morally wrong with it. Nor do the vast majority of other scientists. Many of whom know much more about the species than I do.
The end result is we have a unique way to test for bacteria in a variety of applications that at most save lives, or at a minimum vastly improve the quality.
> Their distinctive blue blood is used to detect dangerous Gram-negative bacteria such as E. coli in injectable drugs such as insulin, implantable medical devices such as knee replacements, and hospital instruments such as scalpels and IVs.
Based on what I read, these crabs are basically given a death sentence. I'd rather them be killed and harvested than bloodsucked tortured and thrown back into a predator ecosystem where they are too delirious and pretty much get butchered by whatever's out there.
> The International Union for Conservation of Nature, which sets global standards for species extinction, created a horseshoe crab subcommittee in 2012 to monitor the issue. The group decided last year that the American horseshoe crab is "vulnerable" to extinction—a higher level of danger compared to the last Red List assessment in 1996.
An artificial replacement might be the only long term solution. Or mass breeding, if it is indeed so expensive.
> And then there's the pure damn necessity. While several companies have come up with synthetic alternatives for detecting the presence of endotoxins in vaccines, medicine, and medical instruments, LAL is still the only test that has received FDA approval.
> And evidence is accumulating that the death rate of bled horseshoe crabs is much higher (more like 29 percent versus 15 percent)
You do understand that a majority means more than 50% right? So 29 percent is not a majority, and certainly not an overwhelming majority
Granted I don't know how often crabs are re-caught, or if they would have the same chance of dying each time.
No we don't. We keep dogs, we* kill pigs and eat them.
*) 'We' meaning a generalised 'you'. I don't.
Basically it's come down to humans deciding the fate of so many animals. We keep our cows and pigs in very narrow places and just enough systems for their survival but no regard for their emotional needs.
Because we are the dominant spicies we act according to our selfish interests. A smarter intelligent spices will probably do the same. If we somehow end up being useful for them, our fate might be the same as chickens, pigs and cows.
It's self preservation, plain and simple. Non-human life is useful and worthwhile only insofar as it improves human life. As it happens, that includes, some would say luckily, trying to preserve a whole lot of lifeforms because we don't yet know whether they will be needed in the future.
I can't find any reason to consider this immoral or wrong in any way. I think it's beyond morality - merely an inevitable side-effect of existence.
With strangers, the expected return would have to be better, probably by a factor of ten or so.
One of the problems with this approach is that estimating expected utility gains (especially other people's) is hard.
And of course you get the weird edge cases with people (think serial killers) deriving pleasure from hurting other people, so you have to use some kind of objective measure that applies at least to most of the population, rather than just trusting the other person that "it really does it for them".