This is and will always be small potatoes in terms of the suffering we put relatively intelligent animals through every day.

We would need to slaughter probably 100,000 animals yearly for the US organ demand (at ~50,000 transplants per year and a buffer).

We slaughter 125 MILLION pigs in the US for consumption a year.

Not to mention that "medical grade" pigs will probably be given a golden ticket in terms of care until they are slaughtered, compared to the extremely abysmal environment millions live in today.

If animal welfare is important to you, scientific research is a poor use of advocating resources while we still eat hundreds of pounds of meat yearly. If advocates reduce meat consumption by even a percent or two it would generally greatly outweigh banning animal based research entirely.

Animal testing isn’t ideal but for important medical advances, animal testing is the only way to demonstrate safety before human trials. At some point, you have to value the life of a human more than mice.

And some of the testing is fun. Like when they give them a buzzer to get more drugs. Lab rats definitely consent to more cocaine.

I mean, you're probably not the only one who thinks anything.

That said, do you eat meat? If so, the meat and dairy industries systematically do egregious things to millions of animals every day.

We are, but being a part of the ecosystem doesn't really mean much. Ecosystems aren't obligations, authorities, sources of morality or subject to it. They're just systems of relationships between organisms in a particular place. Whatever humans do, as long as it involves other organisms, that is our role in the local ecosystem. If we start doing something else, we aren't forgetting our role in the ecosystem, no role was ever assigned to us, our "role" is merely descriptive of what impact we have.

It’s just another version of the food chain

Everyone is rushing in here to say it’s fine because we eat meat too. But I find this whole thing g very revealing of attitudes we usually just don’t think about. We’d never farm organs in human embryos because GASP consent and GASP sanctity of life. But we’ll farm organs cross species, which is surely more difficulty, because we’re so comfortable doing all that to animals.

You can take the perspective that it’s fine because meat. Or you can use this to take a second look at eating meat and suddenly it seems pretty fucked up.

I eat meat. Am not talking down to anyone. I just do actually think about the ethics.

It's definitely fucked up. It reminds me of the WKUK breakfast pig sketch.

Yeah, but you see; the animals are useful in a new way so ethics doesn't matter. We'll worry about that in 50 years when we no longer need them to grow new organs for us

I would see a million pigs die before one human.