As somebody who routinely eats pork and lamb, and shares concern for animal welfare, I don't see any evidence that these animals experienced any undue pain and suffering (besides the death) which is routinely accepted by society for animals we eat.
> The first complaints about the company’s testing involved its initial partnership with University of California, Davis, to conduct the experiments. In February, an animal rights group, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, filed a complaint with the USDA accusing the Neuralink-UC Davis project of botching surgeries that killed monkeys and publicly released its findings. The group alleged that surgeons used the wrong surgical glue twice, which led to two monkeys suffering and ultimately dying, while other monkeys had different complications from the implants.
The mammalian anatomy has been conserved for 65 million years. Function follows structure. We are essentially the same, the only difference is we grew out the neocortex to be more capable of language, vision and abstract thought. All of those animals feel the same fear, pain, and love that we are capable of- we are just able to associate them with ideas better. It is shocking that some people still don't recognize this, but I suppose it is understandable they would reject something that would get between them and their cheeseburgers.
Ironically enough, I'm vegetarian and keep a snake. He is a Ball Python, and not a particularly good eater, so I feed him live rats. Doing this can truly makes me sad as Rat's death is sometimes... prolonged, and sometimes Rat is friendly and smart. But Snake needs to eat whole animals, while conversely I can get by just fine on beans and rice. Keeping and feeding Snake is very–philosophically enlightening(?)–I can't quite grasp the words for it–but it acts as a reminder of the natural order of life, and a reinforcer of why I think of animals the way I do. Snake is a simple, reptilian killing machine[1] juxtaposed by rats who often are smart, curious, capable critters, yet Snake must eat rats or he will starve.
It seems you understand this, but you can't realistically develop new products for human use on any type of a time scale that most people would be happy with, and the amount of human happiness those products enable, especially through longer, healthier lives to share with family, and the literally billions of lives affected, makes testing on animals a worthwhile evil, at least to me.
I've been party to this(your) view before, typically when I defend animal testing and someone points out that I'm vegetarian with confusion and outrage, both mild, and proceeds to remind me that I often cite animal welfare as a significantly motivating factor in my diet. So I guess my comment is to say that I think it comes at least partially from a place of not being close enough to death. We hide away slaughter houses and even import immigrants to work at them, meat comes to us in plastic packages often with specific names that further us from the animal that much more. Indeed, I know that if I had met the cow that produced the cheese that I so love and keeps me from becoming a vegan, I would refrain much more than I do.
But that is just me, I've met plenty of people who raise pigs named porkchop, bacon, and babyback, or a cow named Angus, and while they don't slaughter the animal themselves, I have no doubt they would. They just really love meat and don't have the same reverence for animals that I do, but most of them feel the same way about my (lack of) religion. Different strokes, live and live, it takes all kinds~
[1] I must admit Snake gets curious sometimes wishing to escape and explore, and it makes me sad that I can't let him act upon those wants because it wouldn't be in the best interest of his welfare.
However like all things, it needs to be developed ethically, the counter point of course being that some of our best medical techniques have been developed over the years in unethical ways (by modern standards).
Federal regulators judging which medical research is valuable to society, then evaluate their policies based on that? Or are you asking whether it's worth it for the company to engage in moon-shot research without rock solid proof ahead of time?
All that should matter here is that they follow the rules and act ethically
>The company’s statement does not change the fact that monkeys used by Neuralink at UC Davis had portions of their skulls removed and devices screwed to their heads, nor that Neuralink used a substance called “BioGlue,” which was not approved for use in these experiments and has been widely known to be toxic to nerve tissue since at least 2001. BioGlue came into contact with the surface of at least two monkeys' brains, causing damage and hemorrhaging; one monkey suffered for days after this damage.
...
>The “lead surgeon” who was performing craniotomies and electrode implantation on a monkey, “had concerns about the void in between the two implants and applied Bioglue to fill the dead space.” Later, a necropsy revealed that the monkey had BioGlue on the surface of his brain. There was no mention of BioGlue being applied in the surgical record for this procedure, indicating poor and possibly noncompliant recordkeeping by lab personnel. BioGlue was never an approved substance for use in surgery in the approved protocol.
1: https://www.pcrm.org/ethical-science/animals-in-medical-rese...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/kbwap1dj4e51mfe/2022-02-10%20PCRM%...
The expectation with animal experimentation isn't that everything goes smoothly, or even that all suffering is avoided in exchange for the information that will result in scientific advancement and safety for humans. The expectation is that there isn't undue suffering caused, and an ethics review board deems that the exchange and suffering paid by the animals is "worth it".
It's an uncomfortable reality for sure, and I would not want to be one of those monkeys, even without suffering, meeting an untimely death in service of human knowledge, but I recognise the trade off and it seems like the complainant doesn't have any extra evidence that there are systematic abuses of ethic review procedures and animal welfare standards.
That said, transparency is good and if there is substance to the claim that they Neuralink or UC Davis) are causing undue suffering then I wish them the best of luck fixing it.
>Company veterinarian Sam Baker advised his colleagues to immediately kill one of the pigs to end her suffering.
>“Based on low chance of full recovery … and her current poor psychological well-being, it was decided that euthanasia was the only appropriate course of action,” Baker wrote colleagues about one of the pigs a day after the surgery, adding a broken heart emoji.