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Ethics Policy
Genedits has a strict ethics policy regarding experimentation on animals and studies involving human subjects.Animal experimentation
Animals that researchers commonly conduct experiments on are conscious, experience pain and pleasure, and have emotions. They exhibit goal-directed behaviour and can experience mood swings. We may sum all this up by saying that animals have a certain quality of life. In this respect, they are no different from humans. That being so, it is not sufficient to ensure that animals do not suffer during the course of an experiment. It is also necessary to ensure the following:
- that animals do not suffer any reduced quality of life during the experiment.
- that animals are not killed during the experiment, because killing them reduces their quality of life to zero.
Examples.
- Doing an experiment to investigate the dietary preferences of animals is acceptable.
- Giving guinea pigs increasingly high doses of Vitamin D and waiting to see how long it is before they get sick is not acceptable.
- Doing a longitudinal study to determine the effect on pain levels of giving certain drugs to rats that are naturally suffering from pain is acceptable, provided that the animals do not suffer more than they were orignially suffering and they are not killed during the experiment.
- Inducing pain in rats to conduct an experiment is not acceptable
- Harvesting animal parts during an experiment is not acceptable.
- Killing animals is never acceptable, no matter what methods the researchers use to kill them.
Here are some books on the moral, cognitive, emotional, and legal status of animals:
- Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior, by Marc Bekoff
- Animal Rights: A historical anthology, edited by Andrew Linzey
- Animal Liberation, by Peter Singer
- In Defense of Animals, edited by Peter Singer
- The Case for Animal Rights, by Tom Regan
- Defending Animal Rights, by Tom Regan
- Animal Rights, Human Wrongs, by Tom Regan
- Empty Cages: Facing the Challenge of Animal Rights, by Tom Regan
- The Animal Question, by Paola Cavalieri
- Speciesism, by Joan Dunayer
- Animal Equality: Language and Liberation, by Joan Dunayer
- The Human Use of Animals: Case Studies in Ethical Choice, edited by Tom L Beauchamp
- Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation
- The Cognitive Animal, edited by Bekoff, Allen, and Burchardt
- Through our eyes only? The search for animal consciousness, by Marian Stamp Dawkins
- Thinking without Words, by Jose Luis Bermudez
- Animals at Play: evolutionary, comparative, and ecological perspectives, edited by MarcBekoff and John A Byers
- Taking Animals Seriously, by David DeGrazia
- Minding Animals: awareness, emotions, and heart, by Marc Bekoff
- The Emotional Lives of Animals, by Marc Bekoff
- Animals, Property and the Law, by Gary Francione
- Rattling the Cage: Towards Legal Rights for Animals, by Steven M Wise
- Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights, by Steven M Wise
- Animal Welfare, by John Webster
- animal welfare: limping towards eden, by John Webster