Imagine that you or one of your loved ones is kidnapped, put into an isolated cage without being able to socialise, injected with cancer cells and exposed to radiation so that you develop cancer, injected with viruses, your skull drilled into, and electroshock administered directly to your brain. Or that you are shot with weapons to see what kind of wounds they cause, or subjected to nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.
Picture being forced to drink 15 bottles of wine a day, having tubes shoved down your throat to your stomach, being jabbed in the eye, or subjected to other painful tests, without anaesthesia so as not to alter the experiment’s results. You are always afraid of what they will do to you next and how painful it will be. And you also know that once they have done everything they wanted to do to you, and you are no longer of any use to them, they will kill you (use and discard).
Now imagine that those who experiment on you and cause you suffering think you are just a filthy Latino, a piece-of-shit Black person, or a damned European, American, Russian, or Chinese. And that, therefore, they have the right to harm you, to use and abuse you—especially when doing so benefits those who do have the “proper classification”. It would be cruel, would it not? Those kinds of human evils are what characterise psychopathy, which is far more widespread, to varying degrees, than we might imagine.
And on top of that, the experimenters remain as indifferent as Dr Mengele, who thought of his victims as mere Jews and therefore that it did not matter what they felt—and that it also contributed to the development of medicine for the Aryans, who were, for him, the only ones who truly mattered.
Or like the Japanese nationalists who, during the Second World War, carried out medical experiments without anaesthesia, such as vivisections (operations performed while the victims were alive) that were tremendously painful, on thousands of prisoners they considered the “inferior races” (European whites, Americans and Australians, Chinese, etc.), since all of it was for the good of the Japanese people—the “superior race”, according to them. They believed that, because certain sentient beings did not have the “proper label”, there was no need to empathise with them.
Well, we are carrying out all those cruel experiments on an overwhelming number of non-human sentient beings: between 100 and 500 MILLION, with an M, every year—that is, 1,000–5,000 MILLION in 10 years, and more than 10,000–50,000 MILLION in 100 years. Consider that the human population is around 8 billion people.
And what is more, almost 90% of the procedures are performed without anaesthesia. Among the victims there are many monkeys and also dogs. Experts state that all those mammals feel as much suffering as humans, as their nervous system is very similar.
When it suits us, we consider non-human animals to be very different from human animals—even mere things—but when it benefits us, suddenly they turn out to be very similar to us (including their brain and nervous system), similar enough to use them in experiments aimed at developing products and treatments for humans, or in surgical practice for medical students.
Just as happened with enslaved Black women, who, when it came to breastfeeding their masters’ children, suddenly were similar enough to white women. Throughout history, we have always invented the most suitable narrative to justify different kinds of exploitation—such as that we do it for our loved ones—because a part of the brain knows that harming others is wrong and therefore needs to convince itself, and others, that in that case it is justified for some “good” reason.
Helping to heal some sentient beings does not justify causing this kind of suffering to other sentient beings. The fair thing to do is to conduct experiments on cultured tissues or with human volunteers, paying them whatever is necessary as compensation. And that cost should be borne by the healthcare sector and the users of medical services. Low-cost artificial life extension is not ethical if it comes at the cost of turning the lives of billions of sentient beings into hell.
Thank you for sharing and for not using products that have been tested on animals,
Xavier Paya
Living Without Harm initiative
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