"...health officials have known for decades that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and heart disease..."
I learned that from my mother when I was 15. It would appear, however, that some people haven't yet realized this:
"...yet R.J. Reynolds and the tobacco industry continue to conduct cruel experiments in which constrained animals are forced to inhale smoke every day - for hours at a time - through their noses, holes in their necks, or masks strapped to their faces."
Also,
"Tobacco industry documents state that new additives and products...are currently being tested on animals. R.J. Reynolds killed more than 1,000 mice and rats to test the effects of adding high fructose corn syrup to cigarettes."
Why?
"...to mask the actual taste and smell of tobacco."
Given the existing wealth of knowledge and the reality that people choose - they are not forced - to consume what they know to be harmful substances, isn't it reasonable to argue that experiments such as these, which try to better re-understand the harmful effects of cocaine on human beings, for example, are not defensible? Is it ethical, I wonder, to shift all this suffering from the individuals actually doing the action to hundreds of thousands of innocent, feeling animals?
Surely we can't defend this without appealing to blatant prejudice. And these experiments are funded by us, to the tune of billions of tax and consumer dollars, which, if mum continues to be the word, amounts to tacit acceptance of these practices.
Will be crossposted @ Vegan Soapbox
it also hurts plants. i am a blossoming gardener :) and nicotine on hands transfers to plants and can inhibit growth or damage them altogether so they won't produce. oh, no pun intended on that one :)
Look at that. We don't need to spend billions of dollars to prove this do we? If we do, without the suffering, which would make this issue of great ethical concern, it's just stupid and irrational. And unethical (?), given the context of finite resources.