Animal Experimentation Ethical Standards

[devonin]

This isn't as you might expect, intended to be a thread about the ethics of animal experimentation in general, but instead a specific topic that I've always found quite interesting.

In an Environmental Ethics class I'm taking, we recently had a guest lecture by Dr Dave Brodbeck (You can actually listen to podcasts of his lectures here if you're interested) from the Algoma University College's psychology department, on the subject of animal cognition, and one of the things he mentioned was very interesting to me.

When talking about conducting experiments on animals, he described the incredibly lengthy procedures one has to go through to get permission to experiment on animals. You have to appear before an ethics board and describe exactly what benefit you hope to derive from your testing, precisely what manner of experimentation you plan to conduct, exactly which ways you will be doing things that harm the animals, and all through your experimentation, you are required to document everything you do, and are apt to get spot inspections of your lab to ensure that you're following to the letter, the ethical guidelines you are working under.

However, these rules apply -only- to experimentation on animals with backbones (And octopi) If your subject animal is an invertebrate, you can just test away, any way you feel like, with no such standards at all. You could smash a hundred lobsters with a sledgehammer in your lab because you feel like it, but one dead squirrel without proper approval and your entire laboratory and the institution supporting it can actually just have their entire funding from all sources cut out from under it.

This seems pretty absurd to me, and I'm curious what the CT folk think about the ethical guidelines on animal testing extending only to vertebrates. I mean, yes basically all "higher thinking" animals have backbones (your primates, dogs, etc) but I'm pretty sure that from an animal cognition standpoint, there are plenty of vertebrates that rank below some of the more advanced invertebrates (For example, I think the exception made for octopi doesn't extend to squid, which to me are easily as advanced as octopi are)

Should the ethical guidelines for animal testing extend further?
Should there be ethical guidelines for animal testing at all?
Which animals should be exempt?