by Zoë Pollock
James McWilliams offers one:
The rationale for all animal experimentation is, if you think about it abstractly, troublesome. Scientists use animals because they’re physically similar enough to humans for results to have possible meaning. At the same time, they use animals because they are–so we have long thought–cognitively and emotionally different enough from humans for our exploitation of them to be morally justified. But the more we learn about animals, the more we are realizing, as Darwin himself explained […]: “thought and feeling in animals [is] an inevitable consequence of phylogenic continuity. If morphological and physiological traits are evolutionarily continuous, so, too, are psychological ones.
The Dish 