Did you know that a zebra-fish embryo is not considered a real animal? To perform animal testing you need to get some kind of permit, and they even grade these permits according to the level of pain the animal will feel during the experiment. But if you are handling fish embryos you can do whatever you like without ever having to tell anyone. This is because the embryo is not considered to be a highly developed creature. Stepping on a fish egg would be similar to stepping on a mushroom. Kind of interesting if you think of the fish developmental process, where there will be a new individual formed after only one day. After 24 hours you’re no longer allowed to cut of a single fin of the fish, but during these 24 hours you can cut out multiple organs without anyone judging you.
But if we agree to the idea of embryos not being able to experience real pain, there’s still the question of the adults; How much suffering are we willing to let an animal endure in the name of science? A colleague of mine was recently wondering how she could keep her flies from escaping while she was performing her experiments. Fruit-flies are little suckers for finding ways to escape and she had tried all sorts of things to get them to stay in one place. The thing was that she wanted to cut out the brain of the fly, but during that procedure the fly had to be alive so that the brain was kept as fresh as possible. The point being that she couldn’t kill them until she had them under the microscope. Finally she considered pulling off the legs and wings of the fly and keep it in that state until she could operate on it. I thought this was extremely cruel. Killing something quickly is one thing, but torturing a living being until killing it is something completely different. I can understand the advantage of killing a rat pup by decapitating it; the procedure is fast, causes minimal amount of pain and you get the organs without drug contamination. But pulling off the legs of a rat to make it stand still would be total insanity. So I guess my final question is: can we really be the ones telling which animals experiences more pain than others?
