Weird to have a a scientist behaving so irrationally regarding pigs vs dogs, especially because the pig was chosen for its likeness to a human.
I can't see it being "man's best friend" (dogs have a bunch of special abilities that pigs don't) but both pigs and goats play an important enough role to call them "man's best helpers"
Dogs are extremely versatile and have helped humans over thousands of years. Pigs, on the other hand, are tasty.
It’s not that arbitrary.
You're make my point.
I didn't say there was any logic or deep meaning to it, just that someone being willing to sacrifice pigs but not dogs for scientific research doesn't surprise me at all. In mine, even vegetarians generally find the idea of those in others eating dogs (more so than pigs et al.) abhorrent.
So one can very well claim that torturing beings that can feel pain is wrong.
That’s fine and all except we don’t live in a morality version of the matrix. Philosophical arguments hardly effect human behaviors at large.
> Killing a cell is not really morally questionable
Perhaps. But once the cell is fertilized there’s a large population of prolifers that beg to differ yet there is objective no intelligence at this stage of life.
Humans are not so rational as I think you’d like them to be. They also just are rather uncaring hence while this argument/PETA and so on don’t usually change anyone’s feeling towards the issue.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that humans eat meat, and we've gotten quite used to processing certain species of animals for their meat.
The public sentiment is much more favorable for using pig hearts opposed to dog hearts. It's not nice having to explain that you kill dogs for your research.