The Treatment of Animals for Science vs Food: Is One more Ethical than the Other?

Joel Marks writes in the Hastings Center “Bioethics Forum:

“If it’s okay to confine animals for their whole lives in cages or other artificial environments, perform sometimes painful and/or disfiguring procedures on them, and finally kill them at an early age, as is done routinely in biomedical research, then why wouldn’t it be okay to do the same for nutritional purposes?”

Are not animals selected for human consumption treated with unnatural confinement, subjected to unnatural procedures and then killed for a premature death?

Those who are against animals used for experiments for the understanding and treatment of human as well as animal illnesses with the associated pain and suffering, shouldn’t they be also vegetarians who reject subjecting animals as a food source for humans? Unlike most scientific experiments whose goal is for the medical benefit of humans, there is evidence that suggests that eating meat provides no nutritional benefit that could not be attained with the consumption of vegetables and fruits and indeed eating meat can be harmful to some.

Read the Bioethics Forum article and return here with your comment regarding the ethics of using animals for human and animal scientific research versus killing animals for our food. ..Maurice.

Graphic: Meat. Photograph copied under fair use from http://backpackingrecipes.net .