Animal Rights Question

In my animal science class we were having a debate on wheather we were for or against animal rights, and one of the guys asked a girl who had horses this:

If your horse (your baby, you love this horse a LOT), had the cure for cancer would you kill it to save people around the world from cancer?

To me, it sounded kinda silly. What are the odds that YOUR horse has the cure for cancer? If your horse had the cure then wouldn't some other hroses as well? If that were the case, why would it have to be YOUR horse to die?

The girl who asked said no, and just about everyone started going crazy.
If I were asked I would have said no too, but I would make some exceptions.

I love my horse Athena to death. She's like my kid. The only reason I would let them kill her was if I was absolutely sure that she would have the cure, and if she were already very old. If she died, and they said "Oops, wrong horse." Or "Oh, I guess we were mistaken. No hard feelings, right?" I would be very VERY angry.

Now, if my other horse Snafu (or even my previous horse Playboy) had the cure I don't think I would mind so much. I know it's because I havn't had them nearly as long as Athena, nor have I bonded with them nearly as much or as well as I have with Athena. But that's just how I think.

This question really got me thinking all day.

I had to do a debate on animal rights in my ethics class and we were asked the same question..well, they asked about my partners dog. She said no. I was more torn..I don't know what I'd do. It'd be REALLY hard but if they were absolutely certain I think I'd have to go with it. I'd have restrictions though. They couldn't put my animal (we'll go with horse for this) through any pain, and they'd have to take very good care of him.

Good thing these questions are not realistic though lol! I wouldn't wanna do it!

Exactly!

I would find it extremly impossible for one horse to have the cure and others don't unless my horse is an alien, which is kind of crazy because he acts and looks like any other horse so I would have to say no to that question because they could take a horse from somewhere else like a wild one that is going to be killed or one that is really old

I think the point of this though is for someone to really understand if you value animals above humans or not. Obviously it will never happen but it's a deeper question than what it really says.

If it were possible for one horse,dog,etc to have a mutation that could cure cancer there is no possible way it would be necessary to kill the animal. One could take cells from that animal and grow them in a petri dish and then keep on growing more and more of them. Just think how many they would have to grow to cure all the cancer in the world. Killing the animal that had the cure would be the same as killing the goose that laid the golden egg because once its body was used up the cure would be gone and anyone else who got cancer would die. As long as the animal was alive one could take some cells and grow them and produce more of them and cure more people.

I don't think this is the kind of ethical question where one is supposed to consider plausibility or mechanics.

I had a similar discussion not long ago with someone and that goes for research for anything really.

But here it goes...

Are researchers really trying to find a cure for cancer? Are they really? Because thousands and thousands of people donate money for research etc etc..but really when you think about it, if the cure were found, millions of dollars would go down the drain and million sof jobs and facilities would close and disappear. Do you realise how much money is made in treating those cancer patients? Hospitals need that money to run. Can you imagine how much that would affect the world's economics? Can you imagine how that would affect the world?

So to answer the question, NO. Because I actually doubt the search for the cure of anything, I would not let anyone kill my friend because of a claim to have found a cure.

I agree with you. They would rather torture people with radiation and chemotherapy. The drug that kills malaria also kills cancer according to something I read and it was cheap and readily available but somebody decided to patent its use for cancer treatment to make themselves rich. There were companies claiming to have vaccines to prevent cancer,etc. They do not want a cure in the USA. If we had socialized medicine and nobody was allowed to get rich from treating or curing cancer or anything else I bet they would be curing cancer and not with drugs that make people sick unless they are just plain sadistic. Somebody I used to work with said they killed her father with radiation and he only had one cancer cell.

If someone has one cancer cell they're probably going to get more pretty quickly. Cancer cells are characterised by the fact that they reproduce far more rapidly than normal cells. It's the main principle of why radiotherapy actually works.

To be honest, we probably all have a few cancerous cells in us right now, but hopefully they will die off before they reproduce enough to become a tumour. Also, a single cancerous cell is pretty much non-detectable; there would have to be a growth of them before they could be diagnosed.

Also, there is no such thing as a single cure for cancer. There are many forms of cancer, thousands of them, each requiring specialised treatment.