Animal rights, animal research, and the need to reimagine science

Abstract

What would it look like for researchers to take non-human animal rights seriously? Recent discussions foster the impression that scientific practice needs to be reformed to make animal research ethical: just as there is ethically rigorous human research, so there can be ethically rigorous animal research. We argue that practically little existing animal research would be ethical and that ethical animal research is not scalable. Since animal research is integral to the existing scientific paradigm, taking animal rights seriously requires a radical, wholesale reimagining of science.

Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT05340426.

KEYWORDS:

• Scientific research
• Scientific education
• Animals
• Animal rights

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We follow convention in using the term ‘animal’ to refer to non-human animals and the term ‘human’ to refer to human animals.

2 We would like to thank reviewers of this journal for their helpful feedback.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Christopher Bobier

Christopher Bobier is an assistant professor of philosophy and the associate director of the Hendrickson Institute for Ethical Leadership.

Noah Reinhardt

Noah Reinhardt is a graduate student pursuing a MBA.

Kate Pawlowski

Kate Pawlowski is a graduate student pursuing a MS in public health.