Raising the consequences for animal testing experiments gone wrong.

Last December, in the wake of animal cruelty allegations against Elon Musk’s brain chip startup Neuralink, Vox’s Kenny Torrella wrote about a concept he called “the moral math of animal testing”: the view held by many people that trading some amount of animal suffering is worth it if it can save enough human lives by advancing medicine.

Experimentation on live animals is a divisive, morally charged subject. Slightly more than half of Americans say they oppose using animals in scientific research, according to a 2018 Pew survey, but it depends a lot on how you phrase the question and who is asking. When asked by the biomedical industry whether they support “the humane use of animals” to develop “lifesaving medicines,” many more people say they do, or aren’t sure. These gaps reflect the public’s lack of understanding of how vivisection works in general: Most people don’t know whether animal testing is humane, effective, or necessary, nor do they always know how to define those terms.

Not everyone will agree with my view of vivisection, which is that it’s unjustifiable in nearly all circumstances. But I would think most people will agree that animal experiments should have to clear an especially high bar — that they have to be truly necessary for saving human lives and irreplaceable with non-animal methods.

That is, unfortunately, not how animal testing in the US works at all. Scientists harm and kill animals for all sorts of studies that have nothing to do with saving human lives. Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University, for example, have forced prairie voles to drink alcohol to test whether it makes them cheat on their partners. A Harvard neuroscientist recently came under fire for separating caged mother monkeys from their babies and giving them surrogate stuffed animals to bond with, thus demonstrating, she wrote in a top scientific journal, that “infant/mother bonds may be triggered by soft touch.”