"Researchers to Study Avalanches By Burying Live Pigs in Snow"
This article is getting a decent amount of mainstream coverage. It is the number one story on digg.com right now. What do you folks think?
http://planetgreen.discovery.com/wor...pigs-snow.html
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The use of live animals in scientific research has long been a testy subject (right out the gate with a pun, hm?), but ongoing experiments on lab mice don't seem to grab too many headlines anymore. No, it takes a particularly controversial or cruel-seeming experiment to get animal rights activists into the papers these days.
Take for instance, the most recent study that's stirring the ire of animal lovers everywhere: European researchers have planned an experiment in which 29 live pigs are to be buried under snow, and where they will essentially be observed dying. The experiment was set to begin last week, but has been postponed due to a firestorm of protest.
The study was an attempt to determine what factors make it possible for humans to "survive an avalanche in an air pocket until rescued without suffering permanent brain damage," according to the Canadian Press. The researcher's goal is to better understand how exactly air pockets are used to aid in survival, and in the long run, be able to present better guidelines on how people can survive avalanches.
In other words, the researchers' chief aim is to save human lives. Which seems a noble enough cause, no?
Animal rights activists don't think so--they claim the study is meaningless and pointless, and that it's needlessly cruel. According to the CP, Johanaa Stadler, head of the animal rights group Four Paws said, "It is absolutely unacceptable that these highly sensitive, helpless animals are killed for such an unnecessary test." The fact that the pigs were to be anesthetized and sedated didn't seem to help calm activists down any--and neither did a semi-snide comment from one of the researchers that the pigs days were numbered (whether in the snow or an abattoir) anyways.
And herein lies the conundrum--when is it ethical to sacrifice animals for the benefit of humans? Is it ever? Many would argue so--many of our greatest scientific discoveries and advances in medicine have come at the expense of animals who perished in the lab. Joseph Priestly, the scientist who first discovered the existence of oxygen, did so by suffocating countless mice in a sealed chamber. Few would argue that his contribution has been invaluable to science.
But perhaps it's when the goal or method of an experiment seem more ambiguous that our instincts to protect animals grows stronger, and the line between progress and needless cruelty grayer. Do the pigs really need to die? Don't we have advanced sensors that can tell this kind of thing? How many people really die from avalanches anyways? Would it really give scientists that much valuable information? All questions one might reasonably ask.
Six people have been killed by avalanches this winter so far in the US alone. Dozens are killed in Canada each year, more in Europe, and more around the world. It is an issue worth studying. As for the methodology, since I'm not a scientist, I can neither confirm nor deny that this is the most humane way to gather results.
The real question is, I think; would it be worth it if the scientists uncovered a way to instruct people to behave if caught in an avalanche that could spare them? Would that be worth the death of 29 pigs?
It's quite a loaded question indeed--one well worth debating.
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