09-10-2020, 08:10 PM
I was a young boy aged 7 at the time and remember it well. I asked my mother, "Will the monkey come back safely?" She replied that she doubted it. It was known that the technology did not exist at that time to re-enter the atmosphere safely. I was upset and said, "But that's not fair! The dog will die!"
Let us be clear: the Soviet scientists knew that this dog would not return. This is appalling. This is a classic example, where humans *think* that they have the moral right (as *allegedly* intellectually superior beings) to use other species as "cannon fodder" for their experiments. As a teenager, I sometimes posed the question to those defending using animals for experiments: "But if intellectually superior beings from another world came and used humans for experiments, would that be OK?".
The reply was usually either:
"There is no life elsewhere" - which is what many believed at the time, but is now shown conclusively by science to be false;
or
"Ah, no. We are humans. We are intelligent. They couldn't do that to us." - but modern science has now shown that animals also have considerable intelligence. You can read the famous Cambridge declaration by scientists here: https://do-animals-have-souls.info/cambr...ation.html
BTW, I found this good article on Wikipedia. It gives a good summary of all use of animals in space exploration. The Americans did not callously, deliberately, send a dog to its death, but there were many losses:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animals_in_space
Let us be clear: the Soviet scientists knew that this dog would not return. This is appalling. This is a classic example, where humans *think* that they have the moral right (as *allegedly* intellectually superior beings) to use other species as "cannon fodder" for their experiments. As a teenager, I sometimes posed the question to those defending using animals for experiments: "But if intellectually superior beings from another world came and used humans for experiments, would that be OK?".
The reply was usually either:
"There is no life elsewhere" - which is what many believed at the time, but is now shown conclusively by science to be false;
or
"Ah, no. We are humans. We are intelligent. They couldn't do that to us." - but modern science has now shown that animals also have considerable intelligence. You can read the famous Cambridge declaration by scientists here: https://do-animals-have-souls.info/cambr...ation.html
BTW, I found this good article on Wikipedia. It gives a good summary of all use of animals in space exploration. The Americans did not callously, deliberately, send a dog to its death, but there were many losses:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animals_in_space
