Reddit mentions of Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Major Medical Breakthroughs in the Twentieth Century

reddit constantly makes light of animal rights, which really is one of the most important issues of our time.

It is wrong to torture/imprison/experiment-on animals for the same reasons it is wrong in humans.

"But apes aren't people." - It depends on who you ask. Some think apes are people, see The Great Ape Project. And why are people especially entitled to humane treatment? It is because we recognize that we wouldn't want the same thing done to us. Many white people did not consider black people equally human, and used this as a justification for their mistreatment. Now we recognize that we shouldn't have done that. We do the same thing with animals today.

"No, I mean apes are part of the human species." - Species is just a term of connivence that usually describes animals that can mate and produce fertile offspring. We have to ask why we shouldn't torture humans, and then we will see that those same reasons apply to apes as well.

"But apes aren't as smart as people." - Nowadays we don't say that medical experiments should be performed on retarded humans, since they are not as smart. It is their capacity to suffer that we consider, not their intelligence, when we decide not to perform medical experiments on humans. In terms of capacity for suffering, there is no reason to think that apes and humans are not equal.

"We can gain important medical knowledge from these experiments." - Nazi experiments on humans helped advance our medical understanding, but most people still think they were wrong. Again, consider if it would be worth it to experiment on retarded humans without their consent, since we could learn important things. Furthermore, the value of the information that actually comes from these experiments in dubious. Consider that the vast majority of improvements in life expectancy come from public health measures (sewers, clean water, vaccinations, etc.). As far as medically important drugs, nearly all are discovered serendipitously, rather than in directed research. See this book.

These arguments apply equally well to many animals, certainly the common food animals, pigs, cows, etc. Don't torture them! If you want to eat animals (since they are delicious, and provide many useful products), just find ones which were treated kindly while alive, it's not that hard. Unfortunately, nearly all the meat, milk, leather we have comes from tortured animals. reddit hates vegans. but most vegans are simply doing their best not to torture living things.

reddit is an ass when it comes to animal rights. reddit would have whipped their black slaves in early 1800s America, and they would have sent their jewish neighbors to concentration camps in 1940s Germany. In both cases, groups were thought of as sub-human, and therefore they could be mistreated. Today we do the exact same thing to animals. Being human is irrelevant!

Tl;dr: When thinking about animal rights, consider the animal to be a retarded human child, and then proceed with the ethical decision.