Centuries of animal research have led to major medical breakthroughs for humans.

Laws govern the ethical treatment of lab animals, but mice are not considered animals by these laws.

Lab animals cannot give consent, the mainstay of human research, and often endure untreated pain.

Speciesism is the preferrential treatment given to animals for whom humans have greater emotional attachments.

When faced with the suffering of others, many people instinctively tend to turn away. “Attention has become a moral currency,” writes Bernard A. Saltzman in his new book Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture (2026). For Saltzman, turning a blind eye is “deeply embedded in the experience of being human.”

This is poignantly illustrated in the painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, circa 1558, attributed to Flemish painter Peter Bruegel the Elder, in which the artist depicts the myth of Daedalus and Icarus from Book VIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Throughout the centuries, the myth has captured the imagination of many writers and painters, including the 16th-century Swedish painter Joos de Momper, and even Picasso, whose 1958 version is at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris.

In Ovid’s rendition, the ploughman, fisherman, and shepherd continue their work, despite the amazing sight of a boy falling from the sky. The painting is further immortalized in W.H. Auden’s poem Musée des Beaux Arts: “About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters, how it takes place/while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along…how everything just turns away/Quite leisurely from the disaster…” (Karasu, 2009).

Alternatively, some can just as easily “engage in doomsday scrolling,” develop a prurient fascination with suffering, and become unable to turn away (Saltzman). We live, writes Susan Sontag, in a “society of spectacle” and can become voyeurs “regarding the pain of others” (2003).

Whether we turn toward or turn away from the misfortunes of others, either gesture is a “poetic way of enacting feeling” (Saltzman).

Viewing suffering can bring compassion, a complex emotion that involves not only the emotional response of recognizing the suffering of others but also a desire and wish to alleviate that suffering. But compassion, cautions Sontag, is an “unstable emotion,” and people can become inured to the horror and develop “moral or emotional anesthesia”: although there may be both shame and shock initially, the shock can wear........

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