Horseshoe crab blood to remain big pharma's standard as group rejects substitute
That image of the horseshoe crabs being bled is certainly provocative.<p>> Some of which die after being returned to the Atlantic Ocean following bleeding.<p>I'm super surprised that they even bother. I would have thought this were a simple birth->death captivity cycle. Though I wouldn't be surprised if this were only out of necessity; perhaps the crabs simple don't thrive in captivity.<p>Or perhaps we have less of an ethical standard for the animals we farm just because we like the taste of their milk on our taste buds.<p>Unfortunately, as far as animal ethics go, it feels like progress is so slow that even etching out a comment is a waste of time. It's like being for women suffrage in the 1700s; people just roll their eyes at you, and you hope the people 100 or 200 or 300 years down the road wake up because it's not happening in your lifetime.<p>Then again, I admit it's no simple feat for us humans to have gone from bone and fur and tribal technology to a global technological civilization in just thousands of years. And every awakening and enlightenment is always obvious and taken for granted in hindsight. There's probably even a good benefit to having such glacially evolving ethics: taking a bad fork in the road can kill a civilization.