The Foundation for Biomedical Research recently released a great video which shows how animal research can help animals. The video briefly describes how treatment for bilateral cranial cruciate ligament tears was developed through animal research. It is also worth noting that the surgical processes, developed through animal research, currently are in use helping both humans and animals.
It finishes with a crucial comment for us to remember – “Animal Research saves animals too” – something that many animal rights activists would do well to remember next time they head to the vet with their pets.
If you want to learn more about the operation then check out the following video below which gives more information on this problem.
Cheers
Tom
Speaking of Research 
And that we feed some animal by-products to other animals can be used to justify slaughtering animals for human food. . ..
But, yes, a vaccine for rabies might be justifiably developed using some animals for the sake of other animals on Singer’s account. I presume that Singer would agree that killing a rabid dog is justifiable as a form of self-defense. So some experimentation on animals to develop a vaccine (capturing rabid dogs and using them? testing vaccines on other dogs?) would probably be justifiable, depending upon, as you note, how speculative the benefits are vis-a-vis the harms.
Now whether Pasteur’s testing of the vaccine on a child was justified. . ..
Firstly, Singer is a curious person to bring to your defence as he’d probably agree with research for rabies – he’s fairly publicly said that he supports research where the benefits outweigh the costs (sadly, he doesn’t talk about the difficulty in knowing ex ante whether or not it will work).
Secondly, it’s not just AR people on this site – so most people who don’t have a problem with the initial premise of testing – find it quite important that animals are benefitting to.
Well, from what I can tell those who you are supposing are my colleagues are the only visitors to this site–so hand’s up everyone who thinks that the Rabies vaccine was developed without the use of animals.
And then hands up if you are confused enough to think that this is relevant!
Really? You think Singer and Regan don’t know that veterinarian medicine has progressed through the use of animals? Huh.
I suppose it’s easy enough to test that hypothesis. Seems pretty unlikely to me. Now they might ask the question whether the use of animals in the research that led to this was justified, but that is a different point.
Probably not Singer or Regan… but most AR activists on the street. Please go around asking your colleagues where the rabies vaccine comes from and get back to me.
Well, that’s sort of like saying that vegetarians don’t mention the benefit that slaughterhouses for providing food to animals as well as humans. Just sorta a fatuous point. Sure, that’s true. But, you know, misses the whole point. (And I’m pretty sure that Singer and Regan and most of the people who professionally work on this are well aware of this. But its irrelevance is the reason is doesn’t get mentioned much, not the more condescending suggestion that people don’t know this.)
No, I don’t think they know this… I think they go vaccinate their dogs and they have no clue where the vaccines came from.
I guess the point is simple. It is often argued that humans exploit the animals only for their benefit.
But animals benefit too… In fact, they were some of the first to benefit, such as when the rabies vaccine was developed.
I’ve never understood this argument. Testing polio vaccine on mentally retarded children helped other children.
Even if this is true what relevance would it have? Perhaps it marginally affects a utilitarian calculation about whether a particular line of research is justified, but other than that it is spurious and irrelevant. One might as well argue that the bombing of Hiroshima helped the Japanese economy. Ummm sure, but that’s just not the point. Nice textbook instance of the fallacy of Ignoratio Elenchi,it seems to me.