Do you think that it’s cruel to send animals into space as research? If you were alive when they sent Lika (dog) & Ham

Question: Do you think that it's cruel to send animals into space as research? If you were alive when they sent Lika (dog) & Ham (monkey) into space...WOULD YOU HAVE MINDED????????
- Keywords:
  animal,
  space travel
Asked by howyilms1 to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 15 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by immyt.
- Leila Battison answered on 15 Mar 2012:
  
  I think it is cruel, and they did worse things to cats that you never hear about, wiring electrodes into their brains before sending them to space. But animal research has been necessary to test dangerous equipment or ideas, because if we don’t send animals, we’d have to send a person, and I think people mind a lot more if you try out a new idea on a human and kill him, than if you try it on an animal.
  
  Hopefully though, now science is getting better, we might be able to test new ideas in computer models and not need animal testing any more.
- Adam Stevens answered on 15 Mar 2012:
  
  The cruellest thing is that once the missions had been completed they didn’t really care what happened to the animals so a lot of them died on re-entry.
  
  But like Leila says, if we hadn’t used animals a human being would have eventually had to do it. Actually it turned out that going into space wasn’t that difficult (in the beginning scientists thought that people might not even be able to breathe in zero gravity, or that they wouldn’t be able to use their arms and legs) so we could have probably just sent people up once we got the rockets working, but we didn’t know that until the animal tests.
- Karen Masters answered on 19 Mar 2012:
  
  I think the people doing this didn’t think about animals as suffering – they were so focused on understanding if they could make things survive in space. And they didn’t want to risk sending people. Looking back it seems unnecessary – so perhaps cruel yes, but at the time it was the best way they could figure out how to test the spacecraft…

Question: Do you think that it's cruel to send animals into space as research? If you were alive when they sent Lika (dog) & Ham (monkey) into space...WOULD YOU HAVE MINDED????????

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