The Victims of Invertebrate Experimentation
Around 125 million animals are used in laboratories every year. The numbers are staggering, but even that figure is misleading, because it leaves most of the animal kingdom out of the count entirely. Invertebrates — the vast majority of life on Earth — are excluded from most welfare laws, ethical frameworks, and even the public imagination.
Crabs, lobsters, cephalopods, insects, starfish, worms — billions upon billions of them are bred, captured, and killed in the name of science without a second thought. Vertebrates get at least a token nod of protection, however flimsy; invertebrates rarely get that courtesy. The message is clear: if you lack a backbone, you lack moral standing. It’s a dangerous fiction. One that props up an industry built on routine, industrialised violation of living beings who can feel, suffer, and experience the world in ways science is only beginning to grasp.
Consciousness: Shifting the Burden of Proof
For decades, scientists have asked the wrong question: which animals are conscious? This framing has served a convenient purpose — it allows research to proceed as if animals aren’t conscious until someone proves otherwise. The result? An endless demand for “markers” of consciousness that are either anthropocentric (does the animal respond like a human would?) or circular (if they tick enough boxes, they’re in the club).
Philosopher Kristin Andrews and colleagues argue we need a paradigm shift. Instead of assuming unconsciousness until proven otherwise, assume all animals are conscious unless there is decisive evidence to the contrary. Not only is this more scientifically rigorous — it avoids bias and opens creative new lines of research — it’s also ethically urgent.
Invertebrates, far from being simple automata, display remarkable evidence of subjective experience. Cephalopods like octopuses and cuttlefish show problem-solving, tool use, and nightmares. Crustaceans demonstrate learning, navigation, and avoidance of pain. Insects like bees can recognise human faces, count, and communicate through symbolic “dances.” Worms exhibit sleep cycles, stress responses, and social behaviours. Even sponges and corals, often dismissed as “living rocks,” display activity patterns and responses that challenge the idea of them being purely mechanical lifeforms.
Every time science looks closer, the line between “conscious” and “not conscious” blurs. The null hypothesis should not be that invertebrates are empty vessels, but that they — like all animals — have lives that matter to them.
The Illusion of Oversight
When the public is asked about animal experimentation, oversight makes a difference. A Canadian study of almost a thousand people found that participants trusted science far less when experiments involved invertebrates without any ethical oversight. Confidence rose slightly when oversight was added — but still remained lower than for vertebrates.
Why? Because people aren’t sure what to think about invertebrates. Some said all animals deserve dignity. Others dismissed them as “inconsequential.” Many admitted ambivalence, uncertainty, or simply not knowing.
This ambivalence is not ignorance. It’s discomfort. It reflects the gap between what people feel — that harming a crab or insect may be wrong — and what they’ve been taught — that such lives are worthless.
And yet, oversight committees themselves are no safeguard. They are populated largely by insiders, weigh theoretical human benefits against very real non-human costs, and exclude the voices of the wider public. Their decisions are opaque, their processes shrouded. The outcome is nearly always the same: approval granted, animals harmed.
Science as a Licence to Harm
The problem runs deeper than oversight. It’s cultural.
A recent psychological study illustrated just how far “scientific authority” overrides basic moral instincts. Participants were asked to inject increasingly toxic doses into what they thought was a live goldfish. A quarter refused outright. But over half went through with it to the fatal end. Those who killed were also the most likely to rate the experiment positively.
In a follow-up, participants primed to think positively about science were even more likely to harm the fish. Across Europe, people who identified most strongly with science were also the most likely to support animal experimentation, regardless of politics or religion. The closer someone was to biomedical science, the more comfortable they were with treating animals as disposable.
The psychological mechanism is called instrumental harm: the belief that it’s acceptable to inflict suffering if the outcome seems beneficial. It is the logic that underpins animal research — and it is why invertebrates, seen as least valuable, are the easiest victims.
What Passes for “Research”
It’s tempting to imagine animal experiments as rare and medically essential. The reality is much uglier.
One Australian study, presented as research into intimate partner violence, subjected adolescent female rats to strangulation by weighted silicon bands — three times their body weight. Others were shot in the head with high-speed projectiles. Some endured both. Painkillers were withheld until after the ordeal. Minutes later, the injured animals were forced to perform memory tests before being killed.
This experiment, backed by public funds, was approved by an ethics committee. It was unnecessary, redundant, and cruel. And it was not unusual.
Invertebrates fare even worse, because they don’t even receive the thin veneer of vertebrate protections. Crabs are routinely subjected to mutilation experiments, forced into fights, or tested for pain responses by burning, shocking, or amputating limbs. Insects are deprived, starved, or dissected alive for behavioural trials. Worms are bred, manipulated, and discarded by the millions in genetic studies.
These lives are treated as disposable, their experiences dismissed. The justification? Tradition, habit, and the entrenched speciesist belief that humans are entitled to sacrifice others for “knowledge.”
Cracks in the System
Change is possible — and it’s already happening.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently announced a plan to phase out animal testing in certain drug trials, starting with monoclonal antibody treatments. This isn’t refinement or reduction — it’s replacement. AI-powered toxicity models, lab-grown human organoids, and real-world human data are proving more accurate, more ethical, and more cost-effective than outdated animal models.
The FDA’s own commissioner admitted it: animals have been used more out of tradition than necessity. Rats aren’t tiny humans. Monkeys aren’t morally neutral tools. And invertebrates, though rarely mentioned, are even less justifiable as “stand-ins” for human biology.
When science and ethics finally align, there’s no excuse left.
Speciesism and Supremacy
So why does it continue?
Because animal experimentation is not about necessity. It’s about power.
Speciesism — the idea that humans have the right to dominate other animals — is the bedrock. The same mindset that allows some people to eat pigs while adoring dogs, to cheer at bullfights while condemning whaling, to fund strangulation studies on rats while decrying domestic abuse — sustains animal research.
Gender differences in support for animal experimentation reveal the social underpinnings. Men, statistically, are more likely to endorse it. This mirrors broader trends: men are more likely to hunt, to consume animals, to support bloodsports. Lower empathy, higher dominance. Women, historically, led the anti-vivisection movement, just as they lead much of today’s animal rights activism.
But the real divide is not gender, or even politics. It is empathy. The more someone can see an animal as an individual, the less likely they are to support their use in experiments. The more they view animals as commodities, the more likely they are to justify their suffering.
Towards Emancipation
The path forward does not lie in tweaking oversight committees or debating which species deserve protection. It lies in dismantling the mindset that any species is ours to use.
That means rejecting the framing of invertebrates as “lower” or “simple.” It means assuming consciousness, not denying it. It means investing fully in human-relevant research, not pouring money into relics of the past. It means confronting the supremacy at the heart of the system.
Billions of invertebrates live and die in labs every year, their lives erased from the record books, their experiences denied. To say they matter is not sentimentality. It is science, it is ethics, it is justice.
The cracks are showing. Regulators are beginning to admit the failures of animal testing. Philosophers are challenging the old null hypotheses. Public opinion, though ambivalent, is shifting. Every time we expose what happens behind closed doors, more people recoil.
The question is not whether the system will fall. It is how fast.