Ethical considerations on use and abuse of animals

Question

I wish to raise the attention on ethics and animals. It was fueled by https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/35902/producing-artificial-gunnison-prairie-dog-calls-or-scent-to-attract-the-prairie, which is a question that suspectedly deals with hunting on wildlife and/or the extermination of pests. A more common ethical issue in Biology is the (ab)use of animals for experimentation.

One of the comments placed is "Ethics are of no concern, this is science". Personally, I think this is too black-and-white. The Nazi Doctors called themselves medical doctors and scientists. The invention of nuclear fission led to the nuclear bomb. Science and ethics go hand in hand.

Also, there was a comment made on the shooting question that the use of hunting techniques, such as using mating calls to lure animals in, are all part of evolution. This is off. Not responding to mating calls is bad for reproduction and hence reduces fitness. Imposing a fake call on gunpoint to select the deaf ones out and shoot the ones with keen hearing does not improve fitness.

To generalize the discussion I wish to raise two questions:

1. Should we allow questions that ask for aid in slaughtering wildlife?
The point of discussion will likely include 'what is wildlife'. For example the pond question https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/35862/how-to-fix-a-small-pond-that-has-become-stagnant basically also asks for tips on extermination, but that would in my opinion be simply microorganisms and not much of an issue. Similarly, a rat-infested house will need to be cleaned up for sure (i.e., it concerns a 'pest'). But killing wildlife is a step too far for me, as one needs to actively seek them in the wild in their habitat (outside the urban environment) for the sake of killing them for fun.

2. Should we allow questions that deal with help in animal experimental procedures?
By answering such questions in general, folks may risk the vengeance of left-winged radicals. Moreover, the reason for the experimentation may be ethically questionable. Do we allow any animal experimentation question, or should we ban just-because-we-can-, just-for-fun- and questionable-purpose (testing make-up and the likes) animal-experiment questions?

Answer 1

Science is amoral, scientists are not.

@Remi.b raised an interesting point in the comments of the Prairie dog question.

This is a science website. Ethics should not be of concern here. If one doesn't want to answer by ethics, then (s)he is free not to answer.

I completely agree that science is amoral by its nature. But this site is also for scientists, who have a social responsibility to use and convey knowledge for the benefit of civilisation. Disseminating biological knowledge to the rest of the public has to be done in such a way that justifies any animal, or human suffering, for the benefit of other life.

A thoroughly fascinating book I came across is Pavlov's Dogs and Schrödinger's Cat: scenes from the living laboratory. It gives a reasonably thorough history of scientific animal testing through the ages, without discussing the ethics. One can see how bizarre and cruel tests were devised, and did advance biology.

Note that there are no real international restrictions on ethical experimentation, however many countries have developed laws and guidelines that mostly reach the same effect.

An important part of biological experimental design is taking into account the minimisation of suffering (otherwise known as the three Rs). I, therefore, propose that questions involving extermination, hunting, or other experimentation that induce pain should require ethical justification in a less formal but similar way to how an experimentalist must acquire the relevant ethical approval. At the very least there should be an obvious beneficial context.

Possible Close Reason.

I'm not articulate enough to formulate a well-phrased close reason, but it could be something along the lines of:

This question promotes unjustified suffering or unusual and cruel experimentation.

Perhaps someone could expand on this. We must be careful not to cast all animal testing questions as off-topic.

The issue is that both topics raised can be on-topic. It would be difficult to implement a close reason that would prevent questions that encourage or involve animal cruelty but would promote and allow questions on ethical animal testing and reasonable pest control.

Potential divide in the community.

This is a precedent on SE. Ethics barely comes up beyond etiquette, privacy, and semantics in other SEs. It will undoubtedly be controversial to propose ethical filtering on questions and there will be people on either side of the fence.

1. On the one hand, we should commit to scientific purity; we should not allow emotion to obscure knowledge and the process of discovery. Equally, subjective ethics has no place on an objective Q&A forum.

2. On the other hand, we should be very careful about condoning unethical experimental design, an important part of the modern scientific process - the traditional teleological science has led to atrocities beyond comprehension.

It must be said that most journals, part of the current scientific process, are very careful about promoting ethically tricky papers and will reject almost anything that involves inducing human pain. Any serious academic institution also has ethical guidelines on animal testing.

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Personal stance.

I thought I would include a closing statement on my general stance on the animal testing so that you can get a feel for my personal bias.

I'm uncomfortable being part of a community that tolerates unusual and cruel behaviour. As a computational biologist/bioinformatician I rarely have to deal with ethical considerations and have never dealt with consent for animal testing. Generally though, like a lot of the scientific community, I am thoroughly in support of responsible, safe, and ethically monitored animal testing whilst alternative methods are developed for modelling the human system.

Recently a major stroke research charity restricted its grant money to no animal testing in the UK. Since strokes are a systemic disease this may not be the most responsible thing to do, and using animal testing ethics as a PR stunt could harm people (I hope this isn't what they were doing).

It is important to remember that animal testing experiments, particularly in the EU, are now always justified and have saved countless human lives, which I personally believe are more important than animal lives (however I hope I have made it clear that I value animal lives too).

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Afterthoughts

I have looked around the Biology.SE and found very little that actually promotes or advocates animal cruelty.

I'm not sure if we should go to great measures to introduce a close reason since generally the community does a good job at highlighting the difference between animal cruelty and animal testing.

Our aim is not to be an ethical body. Although personally I and many others on the site disagree morally with hunting, we should not impose those beliefs on people who perhaps grew up with it as part of their culture and tradition, and we should engage responsibly with scientific biological discussion when biological science overlaps with hunting. Although I would prefer something more robust than semantics to close animal cruelty questions, given the low ask rate it should suffice for the time being.

Answer 2

Generally, I think that both types of questions can be on-topic, with the modification "managing wildlife" instead of the strongly charged "slaughtering wildlife". However, to be on-topic questions must be framed in a biologically meaningful way, for instance by relating to processes, mechanisms and experimental procedures, but this is the case for all questions at the site.

1. Managing wildlife
Pest management is a scientific field in its own right (see e.g. the journals Pest Management Science and Journal of Pest Science), and the same goes for Wildlife management, which includes for instance hunting, human-wildlife interactions and conservation (see e.g. Journal of Wildlife management and European Journal of Wildlife Research). Both fields can also be seen as subfields of applied ecology (sometimes published in more general journals, e.g. Journal of Applied Ecology and Ecological Applications), and to disregard this competely and deem such questions as off-topic does not make any sense for a biological StackExchange. More personally, the research at the department where I'm currently working consists to a large extent of applied ecology, either dealing with pest management, wildlife or conservation biology. Therefore, I think questions regarding pest management (or wildlife management in general, including hunting) can be on-topic if they are framed in an appropriate way, irrespectively of being academic or of general/practical interest (we do not really make this distinction in other topics).

The issue of pest management is also not only dealing with insects in agriculture or forestry. For instance, management of rabbits in australia, bullfrogs, racoons and many rodents come to mind, but there are also many other examples. It is also important to remember that some pest species are introduced and/or cosmopolitan species that are also relevant for conservation biology, since they put pressure on rare indigenous species. Therefore, management of wildlife or pest species is not simply a black & white issue of "bad" human-centered management and "good" conservation biology.

2. Animal experimental procedures
Animal experimentation is used as a method in medical and biological research, so I do not see any reason to ban such questions. We allow all other types of questions that deal with biological research, so why should these be excluded? Generally, these methods are also legal in many/most countries in different forms, so to ban them would be strange from this perspective as well.

Regarding both topics, I can also think of questions that I would dislike strongly from a personal/ethical standpoint. However, I suspect that many of these questions can be closed for other reasons as well (too broad, poor background, opinion-based), and we should be able to deal with them on a case-by-case basis. For instance (using the example from @WYSIWYG), I struggle to see how a question in "favour of killing of endangered species" can be framed in a reasonable and biologically interesting way. I also think that @resonating has a good point in that the community can choose "to exercise its moral compass", and users can downvote and choose not to answer questions that they dislike from an ethical perspective. At the moment, I do not think that a custom close reason is needed to deal with these issues, since we have very few of these types of questions and I also think it will be tricky to formulate such a close reason that isn't subjective and/or doesn't exclude topics that should be on-topic for the site.

Slippery slope

If we start evaluating the ethics of individual questions on hunting, pest control and animal experimentation, we are on a slippery slope towards moderation that could easily turn subjective and inconsistent. There are many other topics that can be just as controversial as the ones mentioned above, for instance cloning and genetic modification. It would be extremely unfortunate if go in the direction of letting the ethical qualms of individual users guide the entire community. Also, as mentioned above, I think that most "unethical" questions will be closeable for other reasons as well.

In the same vein, I think the suggestion by @GoodGravy that "...questions involving extermination, hunting, or other experimentation that induce pain should require ethical justification" is misguided and impractical. If the ethical justification is to be evaluated, how can this be done in a fair and predictible way? To me, the evaluation would depend on the specific group of users that vote to keep open or close on each individual question. All close-votes natually has an element of this, but the effect is compounded if the evaluation is based on subjective elements such as the ethics of the questions.

Non-academic advice

Some of the comments and answers mention that only academic advice should be allowed as on-topic. I think that such a division between academic and non-academic is really hard to define, justify and uphold.

First of all, we get a large number of questions that are curiosity based with very little previous reseach from the poster. These can hardly be labelled "academic", even if the question mentions a couple of subjects or buzzwords. To start targetting "non-academic" questions would therefore change the site practices quite a bit.

Second, I don't think you can make a clear division between questions asking for advice and those that don't. To a large extent, this just depends on the exact wording of the question, and questions searching for advice can often easily be reworded in a more general form (the same goes for no-effort homework questions).

Third, I think we should encourage, not discourage, "non-academic advice" questions from professional working in fields related to biology, e.g. fisheries, agriculture, horticulture and forestry. They could be a great addition to the site if phrased in terms of relevant processes while clearly explaining the problem that has to be solved. In fact, if I would have to choose between one or the other, I would much rather have practically relevant, applied questions in these fields that requires answers based on biology than many of the top voted questions at BioSE. Brief examples of interesting applied question could be:

I'm trying to manage a population of wild boars, and am wondering how to best allocate the hunting effort. Should we focus on hunting the yearlings or older individuals that are reproducing? Wild boars live in tight social groups were only a few individuals reproduce. To target the dominant reproductive individuals therefore seems sensible, since it will drastically reduce the reproduction in groups. However, I've heard that such hunting practices can result in the groups splitting into several smaller groups each with reproductivly active individuals, which could lead to higher reproductive rates in the long run.

Without knowing this area particularly well, I know that such consideration has been an active area of research. Answers can be based on the social dynamics as well as the sensitivity of the population growth rate to changes in different vital rates (i.e. the same method that is often used in conservation biology, but from the opposite perspective).

I've read that biological pest control using natural predators can be an effective way to manage pests. I'm now considering using this more actively in my own wheat fields, by using wider unmanaged field borders or unmanaged plots within fields to support larger predator populations. However, to be able to weigh the pros (increased pest control) and cons (smaller planted fields) I need to know more about how large the added pest control really is (the effect size). What has been observed in previous studies? My fields lie in the northern part of Germany, and it is also worth mentioning that my "field margins" are relatively wide due to relatively small individual fields and wide ditches. Is it likely that I will observe a postive effect from additional measures to support biological pest control?

Answers to this question could be based on the large body of literature that has tried to quantify these types of effects in different types of landscapes, field geometries, crops etc, while also trying to weight the positive effect against the less effective management of more fragmented fields and smaller planted areas. Also note that both these examples could easily be posted by users from a non-academic background and perspective.

Postscript

Overall, I think that the premise of the question as well as several of the comments and answers are somewhat ignorant, especially to the fact that pest management is a huge established field of science, which most users of the site probably depend on indirectly for the food that is found on their plates.

Answer 3

1. Maybe, but perhaps some should languish unanswered on principle.

This is an opportunity for the community to exercise its moral compass. If someone wanted advice on how to keep hamsters alive as long as possible while deep-frying them that would generate related questions that would be on-topic here, but I would not feel comfortable answering. Questions related to boiling a lobster are ethically very different but scientifically very similar. They're orthogonal axes, there's no easy way to say "all unethical things on that side of the line". If something is terrible, don't answer it. All SE sites rely on the judgement of their users. Use yours.

2. Definitely.

Falls under "questions about techniques", defined as on topic.

We can make a stand and say "only ethical procedures according to this standard of ethics allowed, no questions about all the other horrible things" but that doesn't actually do anything. If someone wants to know what the most humane way to kill a deer is, should we turn them away because hunting and hunting-related things are off-topic? People who want answers will get them. Do we want people to get them from Bio.SE or the internet at large?

This is where the answers are. We can't stop people from doing unethical things to animals and each other, whether we allow their questions or not. What we can do, what we should do, is provide accurate answers and ethical advice. It prevents community isolation and it's the only way to actually cut down on bad things.

Answer 4

This required quite some thought and these are my opinions on the question of ethics.

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A note on ethics

Ethics, like morals, are subjective. What is right to a person or community may be wrong to the other. Therefore, the best option is to consider what is legally ethical. Now, even laws are different for different countries and since SE does not represent any country, our stand should not based on laws of a particular country.

Regarding Good Gravy's suggestion: "questions involving extermination, hunting, or other experimentation that induce pain should require ethical justification". I guess that may be interpreted that it does not require ethical justification to kill an organism that does not exhibit a response that we call as pain. Note that scientifically pain is just a chemical response and even plants elicit chemical signalling to injury. What is painful is also subjective. (Basically, you have to define pain. Many religions and cultures claim that their method of execution is the best because it is painless.)

So it is best to define some rules so that any such conflict of opinion may be avoided.

These are some categories that I think should be considered off-topic:

• Questions explicitly in favour of killing of endangered species
• Questions asking for any sort of advice regarding "pest" management. Questions asking for advice should be purely academic in nature.
• Questions related to animal husbandry in non-science sectors (Though I am not sure if this is too rigid).

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Questions regarding animal experimentation

Fearing that if we allow animal experimentation questions some activists may not like it, is like is saying that we should not talk about evolution because creationists would not like it. We should not be worried about any unscientific mob, however, it is important to follow some ethical guidelines while performing research.

So my opinion is that any question regarding animal experimentation should add a declaration that they follow the animal ethics guidelines of their institute. We cannot actually go back and investigate but we cannot be held responsible if the norms have not been followed.

Questions related to advice on animal execution, euthanasia or management should be considered off-topic as these are to be followed as per the institutional animal ethics norms.