The ethical stance on animal experiments

The Australian philosopher Peter Singer is the author of the book Animal Liberation, which I translated into Italian with the title Liberazione Animale and was published by Mondadori, one of the major publishing companies in Italy. The book, in both languages, has given rise to an international movement. Singer goes to the crux of fundamental central ethical questions. The central moral question, when we talk about humans using animals for medico-scientific experiments or in machinised farming conditions and slaughter for human food, is not "can non-human animals think or can they talk?" but "can they suffer?" The answer is obviously yes. Human beings will also benefit from the end of medical-pharmaceutical experiments on animals, due to the species differences which lead the experimenters to apply to humans results obtained from other species who have different anatomy and physiology from us and as a consequence it is extremely risky to deduce that some practice or substance innocuous for other animals will have the same effect on humans. As I have explained in my post published here just before this one, the consequences can be and often are disastrous for humans, as many famous cases, like that of the drug Thalidomide and numerous others, have demonstrated. Ethics and science on this subject lead to the same conclusion.

Why Animal Experiments must be outlawed not only for ethical reasons but also for medical reasons

Experiments on animals in medical research to apply the experiments' results to human beings does not just harm the animals who suffer terribly (not for nothing this practice is called "vivisection"), but are also dangerous for humans, because it is well known that different animal species (of which we are one) have different reactions to the same substances, medical procedures and all that these experiments entail, and therefore applying the results of animal experiments to humans is an unreliable practice and causes severe problems to human subjects. As the great author Hans Ruesch wrote in his book "Naked Empress, present medical science is accused", "When the drug compamy has demonstrated that a new drug is innocuous to animals, the drug company obtains the authorisation to sell it for human use, after very few clinical trials". There is a long list of pharmaceutical and medical disasters to testify that. One of these disasters was the case of the Talidomide, a tranquilliser invented by the German company Chemie Grunenthal, which after three years of animal experiments on thousands of animals was thought to be so innocuous that its sale even without a medical prescription had been approved in all of West Germany: this was reported by Time magazine on 23-2-1962. This tranqu physiologist, surgeonilliser was not just was one of the many pharmaceutic drugs sold under different labels, but a genuinely new product, and therefore the preventative tests on animals - as the lawsuit which followed demonstrated - had been particularly conscientious and widespread. It is interesting that scientists themselves, among whom the celebrated physiologist, surgeon and doctor Sie Charles Bell, have remarked that this research method is anti-scientific exactly because it is inhumane: because it is practised by insensitive or hardened people, in whom the most equisite human qaulities have been destroyed or never existed, sensitivity being a component, and a minimal one, of human intelligence. The thalidomide pharmaceutical drug, which caused 10,000 deformed babies as well as causing irreversible peripheral neuropathy in innumerable adults, is a totally innocuous substance for nearly all animal species, whereas the innocuous Aspirin, which mankind has consummed in enormous quantities for more than a century, causes deformed births in rats. Manufacturers of Entero-Vioformio, largely used by men, recommend not to give it to pets and farm animals, for whom it can be deadly.

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The Beautiful Viareggio Carnival

The Viareggio Carnival 2026 took place from February 1 to February 21, with spectacular events and parades of allegorical floats. Dates and Program Start of the Carnival: The Viareggio Carnival 2026 began with the opening Masked Course on February 1 at 15:00, followed by by a fireworks display that marked the official start of the festival. 2 Masquerade Courses: During the Carnival, there were several masquerade courses, including evening events that start at 5:00 pm. Shrove Thursday, one of the most anticipated days, had its masked course at 17:00, creating a magical atmosphere with the lights of the floats. 2 Closing of the Carnival: The Carnival ended with the closing Masked Course on February 21st. 1 3 Sources Activities and Attractions The Viareggio Carnival is famous for its gigantic floats, music, fireworks displays and the festive atmosphere that involves the whole city. Every year, the carnival attracts thousands of visitors, offering a unique experience of fun and culture. www.laversilia.it +1 Tickets Tickets for masked courses can be purchased online and vary according to the type and date. It is advisable to book in advance, as demand is high during the Carnival period . www.laversilia.it +1 For more details and updates, you can visit the official website of the Viareggio Carnival.Don't miss the opportunity to participate in this extraordinary event!

Memory and Psychoanalysis

 

The so-called "memory wars" were a prolonged conflict of views throughout the 1990s between psychotherapists and scientific psychologists about whether childhood memories of sexual abuse could be totally forgotten ("repressed", in line with psychoanalytic theory) and then "retrieved" in adult age through psychotherapy and drugs.

The former group, who coined the concepts of both repressed and recovered memories and many of whom derived their livelihood from them, generally believed that the answer is yes, while the latter group, headed by international memory expert Elizabeth Loftus, said that their own experiments disproved them and replied no.

It's been pointed out, by comedienne Roseanne Barr who claimed to have recovered memories of being abused as a child during therapy after something similar had happened to her husband, fellow comedian Tom Arnold, that memories of war can be blocked. So, she rhetorically asks, why not sexual abuse memories?

I'll start by attempting to answer that question. Perhaps war memories are wiped out because their trauma is of a different nature: it involves the fear of dying.

I had a quite serious car accident once, which I've forgotten from the moment I was in the car's passenger seat and felt the impact of another car to when I was in the hospital.

I'm just hypothesizing, but it could be that the fear for one's life has a traumatic power unmatched by that of sexual abuse.

I find it extremely schizophrenic of our "sexually liberated" society that, while we generally consider sexual activity to have no or little moral relevance - certainly much less than our great-great-grandparents attributed to it -, at the same time we ascribe to sex and sexual experiences an immense psychological power, to the point of potentially totally destroying our mental health.

Rape and sexual abuse of adults and children are viewed as the most heinous crimes (as Law and Order puts it), worse than comparably bad physical attacks and even - absurdly - worse than murder.

Is this - the exaggeration of the psychological importance of sex - the way we compensate the underestimation of the ethical importance of sex?

The enormous power attributed to sex in mental health originally derives from a false theory, Freud's psychoanalysis. 

Freud himself considered it as a scientific theory. 

One of the greatest philosophers of science of our time, Sir Karl Popper, disagreed. According to his criterion of demarcation between science and metaphysics (non-science), a theory is scientific only when it can be empirically refuted - by observation or experiment. 

Popper believed that psychoanalysis is compatible with every possible observation: if the patient agrees with the psychoanalyst's interpretation, he proves it to be right. If the patient disagrees, it's only due to his resistances, which proves that the interpretation found some repressed area in his subconscious and therefore is right. 

Despite the fact that this often happens in psychoanalysis and that supporters of the theory act in the dogmatic way which Popper ascribes to them, defending it against any contrary evidence, I think that psychoanalysis is scientific in the Popperian sense because it can be proven false. 

In fact it has been proven false. 

Its laboratory is the psychoanalyst's couch itself. The psychoanalytic therapy should, according to the theory, help to restore mental health. 

It has been amply shown that in the overwhelming majority of cases it doesn't. Often it leads to more lifelong misery and even suicide. 

Ergo, the theory is false. 

Patients have voted with their feet, and psychoanalysis has in the last few decades lost much of its credibility not just among its potential clients but among the public in general. Cinema and literature, in addition, once drew from psychoanalysis far more of their inspiration than they do now. 

Even more, psychology scholars have increasingly abandoned their attraction to Sigmund Freud's ideas. 

The progress of scientific psychology has helped disproving psychoanalysis, showing that the mind doesn't work in the way Freud believed. 

The study of memory is a perfect case in point. 

The dichotomy between "therapists" and scientific psychologists about the repressed and recovered memory versus false memories is exactly this. The former still think in Freudian terms, the latter don't.

Environmentalism Is Not Always Protecting Animals

There is a difference between wanting to protect the environment and being an environmentalist. 

One of the many problems with environmentalism is that, although there are environmental philosophies rooted in the idea that the environment and environmental objects have an ethical value in themselves, independently of their utility for human beings, often environmentalism is a selfish attitude, it stems from an egotistic concern for the human species: the environment needs to be protected not per se, not because of the inherent moral value of its (other than human) inhabitants, but only as a means to the ultimate ethical goal: the human species. 

This is a Kantian attitude: the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant thought that animals should be given some moral consideration not for themselves but only as a means to human ends, because mistreating them and being cruel to them leads to a greater likelihood of being cruel to other humans. So the end, in this view, always remains man and man only. 

Environmentalism generally is still speciesist: it is still well inside speciesist limitations. 

This is the way anyway that environmentalism has historically developed; it doesn’t necessarily mean that it could not be different. 

An example of this conflict between environmentalism and anti-speciesism is when major, mainstream environmental organizations call for extensive animal-testing programs of pesticides or other chemicals, despite the fact that animal tests don't give any reliable information on the toxicity of these substances on human beings.

Famous environmental associations are responsible for REACH, the greatest animal testing programs ever. REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemical substances) is the European Community Regulation on chemicals and their safe use, and at least 9 million laboratory animals are estimated to be subject to the tests, although some estimates give as many as 54 million vertebrate animals. It entered into force on 1 June 2007, and was planned to be implemented over the next decade. 

Another example is the support for wind turbines as an illusory replacement for fossil fuels. Not only they cannot achieve the latter goal, but also wind turbines are killing a great number of birds and bats caused by collision and barotrauma—internal injuries, due to the animals' being exposed to too rapid pressure changes when they get close to the turbines' moving blades trailing edges.

Environmental issues need to be explored but with a difference: we do not take for granted any claims, including those of the environmentalist movement.

Everything must be backed up by sound scientific work for us to accept it.

Global warming, recycling, pesticides, every area is scrutinized and open to controversy.

The environment is connected to human health on one side and to animal ethics on the other.

We need to examine the cases in which the environmentalists take an approach which is at odds with animal ethics.

Italy. Double Coronavirus-Conspiracy Twist from Space

By Enza Ferreri

This article was published here: Italy. Double Coronavirus-Conspiracy Twist from Space


Colonel Luca Parmitano, Italian Air Force officer with 25 years of service and 6 space missions behind him, engineer and astronaut of the European Astronaut Corps for the European Space Agency (ESA) since 2009, said he was aware of the pandemic danger posed by the new coronavirus as early as November. Parmitano, who is the commander of the International Space Station (ISS) since 2 October 2019, stated in a 25 April interview:

I already knew since November while I was in space. On board we have a daily connection with the events on Earth, we also have access to the internet and as early as November we had started to follow the first infections, initially only in Asian countries, then after my return the first contagions in Europe.

A couple of weeks later, in a second interview, Colonel Parmitano confirmed what he had already revealed:

Already in November we were aware of this probable pandemic and above all its seriousness that was spreading like wildfire in Europe just before my return.

These declarations have started a number of speculations, casting doubts and shadows on Italy's Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte (pictured above with Trump): how is it possible, then, that Giuseppe Conte, who also has privileged access to secret services' intelligence, knew nothing about it?

David Rossi on defenseonline.it posed this rhetorical question, explaining that the Prime Minister in November couldn't possibly know less than the ISS commander.

How, therefore, did Mr Conte find himself so unprepared, even though he knew of the epidemic over three months before the moment it erupted in Italy? Why has he not taken precautionary measures, such as subjecting the soldiers who participated in the Wuhan games on 18-27 October to a medical examination? If he did, what were the results? If he didn't, why not?

All this fuelled in Italy the conspiracy theories - which, despite the common narrative that wants them to be fruit of mad or evil imagination, like all theories may be good or bad, true or untrue until further investigation - that knowledge of the coronavirus threat was kept secret.

Fast forward to the 25 May, when the ESA Italia Twitter account posted a "clarification by ESA astronaut @astro_luca regarding the recent media reports concerning him". In it Parmitano admitted to an error in his time reporting, due to the fact that on board the ISS they don't use a calendar. So, he confused months and what he thought was November was in fact February.

Immediately all the "fact-checking" websites, conspiracy-theory hunters and the general Left-wing brigade screamed: "Fake news!".

Not so fast. David Rossi on Difesaonline again pointed out something that didn't seem right in this explanation, for example:

Since 1965 Omega, now owned by the Swatch Group, has put on the wrist of astronauts in human participation missions the masterpieces of Swiss watchmaking excellence. One of them is the Speedmaster Skywalker X-33, especially designed for space explorers and tested and qualified by the European Space Agency (ESA).

It was developed to satisfy those who, like astronauts, use special functions such as: three different time zones, chronograph, timer, MET (Mission Elapsed Time), PET (Phase Elapsed Time), three alarm clocks and, last but not least, the perpetual calendar. The watch is clearly visible on the wrist of Colonel Luca Parmitano on the occasion of at least three interviews from space during the Expedition 61 mission.

The officer, however, in the ESA release (see link) states that "on board the ISS we do not use the calendar, but the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The year starts with day 1 and ends with day 365, and events are performed according to this schedule. Consequently, it is possible to confuse one month with another since we never refer to it, but we use the UTC day". Does it mean that he never looked and did not use the functions of his watch developed specifically for the needs of astronauts?

Colonel Luca Parmitano then says that on board the ISS he had access to "news agencies and large television networks". Did he really never notice that these brought him the news by indicating, in a corner, so-to-speak terrestrial dates and times, allowing him at every broadcast to easily link events to specific months?

Add to it that, while it's relatively easy to confuse days, it's much more difficult to confuse months; that he posted on Facebook as many as 35 times in November and 41 in December and it's hard to believe he never once noticed the date; that through all this there were the Christmas holidays, if he needed a reminder of the period of the year. Add all this, and the plot thickens.

David Rossi again:

How can one forget the wishes for a Happy Christmas and the thoughts "for those who are away from their family", expressed on board the ISS just before the Festivity? And the greeting video call to the singer Jovanotti at the end of December? And before that, didn't he get excited when talking to a big star like Paul McCartney in early December?

Maybe he did not get excited but surely he was proud when, at the beginning of NOVEMBER, he had a contact with our President who is also someone from his same region [Sicily], Sergio Mattarella?

SOURCES AND PHOTO CREDIT
Libero Quotidiano
Difesaonline: Is It Possible Conte Didn't Know?
Too Many Things Don't Seem Right
Services Warned USA, NATO Allies and Israel