June 2012
11 posts
May 2012
15 posts
I phrased my answer to your question poorly, but I feel it's necessary to say I have some issues with it as well. It's interesting because I'm going into a field that experiments extensively on insects (neuroscience) and it is always discussed as the morally permissible alternative to using mice and mammals. Interesting question that's gotten me thinking as well.
I had a neurology-based prof who told us much the same. Actually he would delight in telling us that invertebrates weren’t covered under laws that dictate proper scientific codes of conduct and animal abuse (I’m not familiar with these laws obviously) before directing us to crack open live clams and watch their beating hearts.
I get that insects and invertebrates might suffer less than vertebrates would under the same conditions (especially when consciousness is considered), but it’s ridiculous to act as insects aren’t aware of damage being done to them in analogous ways (even if those ways aren’t the same pain feelings we experience). And what is pain, really, but an indicator of damage?
That’s not to say that I’m opposed to using inverts/any animals for science. I’m not even opposed to using insects before using other animals who experience pain more intensely. But to justify killing insects/inverts ON THEIR OWN by their relative ability to feel pain, I think, is silly.
I hope that made any sense at all. I realize you said ‘moraly permissible alternative’ and that totally validates what you’re saying with regards to lab testing. But I think that when we’re just looking at insects (for pinning, for the morality of squashing them, blahblah), we should acknowledge that they are at least ‘aware’ of damage being done to them.
I Like Bugs!: Pinning insects, a moral dilemma →
homopteran.tumblr.com
I’d like some help deciding what to do here:
Last fall I worked on a project pinning/identifying insects. I learned much more than I ever have by observation alone, and I’m considering beginning a collection of my own.
THE PROBLEM is that I’m sort of morally opposed to killing insects. When I…
Okay, my answer was a little flippant there, but it’s true, and I’ll expand upon it.
Collection of scientific specimens can suck. You go out into the field, you see amazing, amazing animals doing their thing, and then, yes, you do kill some of them. In the case of insects, this can either be passive (e.g. pitfall traps) or more active (i.e. sticking them into a killing jar). In the case of herpetological collecting, it’s almost always very, very active (i.e. euthanasia back at a lab) and it does make you feel pretty damn guilty.
But, the thing is, that when we build collections, this is the sort of thing that directly contributes to our own knowledge and understanding of the natural world … and oftentimes, we don’t even know what kind of good those collections will do in fifty years. My research essentially relies on the fact that people liked to shoot big, scary animals a hundred years ago. Dr. Cesar Nufio is using fifty year old grasshopper collections to study climate change. I have friends who are studying everything from conservation biology to long-term evolutionary history using (and building) museum collections.
And all of the questions that we’re answering with those collections (except for my research, which is pretty much useless) is relevant to conservation, to understanding biodiversity, to understanding what life on this planet is doing, what it has been doing, and it’s giving future generations a critical tool to assess the world that we’re leaving them.
And in order to be important, collections don’t have to be part of a fancy, curated museum. If you have a private collection that’s well curated, even if you’re just keeping it because you think that, say, buprestid beetles are quite nice looking, you can use it to do your own research. You can donate it to a museum. You can use it to understand biodiversity in your own area, and use it to spur action. You can show school kids a box of insects under glass, and make them understand that these things aren’t scary or awful, they’re beautiful, and amazing and worth keeping alive.
Scientific collections can do *so much* to make the world better. And if you are killing living organisms to make them, just make sure that their death was worth it.
SO LABEL EVERYTHING. ON ACID FREE PAPER. AND KEY OUT YOUR DAMN SPECIMENS.
Well crap, I. . just might go collecting right now then!
Seriously though this makes a whole bunch of sense, thank you. If I can figure out a way that my collection is properly preserved/legible then maybe it is ok (if it has a reasonable potential to benefit more than just me).
Pinning insects, a moral dilemma
I’d like some help deciding what to do here:
Last fall I worked on a project pinning/identifying insects. I learned much more than I ever have by observation alone, and I’m considering beginning a collection of my own.
THE PROBLEM is that I’m sort of morally opposed to killing insects. When I look at an insect, I see both the species and the individual, and I recognize that that individual has its own life. I can logic out that killing the individual is OK in terms of population stability and community dynamics blahblahblah, but there’s still a life being taken - and I can’t quite value my personal learning over somebody else’s life, can I?
I know this sounds sappy, but it’s not. My morals are based in cost-benefit analysis, I swear. I’m just ambiguous about this. I WANT to collect them to learnlearnlearn and starestarestare. But without the justification of an actual study being done, I just can’t bring myself to put anybody in the killing jar.
For you bug collectors - how do you justify it? I’ve heard justification at the population level, but I feel those don’t apply when it’s only a single person gaining benefits from the death (as opposed to “in the name of science that can be used to help better understand/protect that individual’s population/species”). So how do you justify killing for your own personal/amateur collections?
