According to the USDA's "Annual Report Animal Usage by Fiscal Year" for 2010, 1,134,693 animals were used in medical research. This number, of course, does not include mice, rats, birds, and fish, since these animals are not protected by federal regulations. Adding these in, about 26 million animals are used in research each year. That may sound like a lot of animals—and it is! But let's turn attention to our stomachs: 8.13 billion chickens are killed for food each year, 269 million turkeys, and 40.8 million steers and calves. 117.7 million highly intelligent and sensitive pigs are killed for food each year, compared to a mere 53,260 pigs used in medical research. (If you have any doubt about the sentience of the animals we eat, read Amy Hatkof's The Inner World of Farm Animals or Marc Bekoff's The Emotional Lives of Animals.)

You might look at these numbers and conclude that bioethicists and medical researchers really don't need to worry about lab animals. The measly 26 million animals used in research are a drop in the bucket, all things considered. And they are put to good use, we would hope (though looking closely at the details of some of the studies conducted, a healthy skepticism is in order). More animals die in order to become food for doctors, nurses, patients, medical researchers, and bioethicists than die in research labs around the country. Hospital cafeterias are often filled with concessions of McDonald's and Taco Bell. As if the irony of feeding sick patients on the very food that may have made them ill in the first place weren't painful enough, we have the blaring moral problems associated with raising and killing animals in confined animal feeding operations—most pointedly, the horrendous kind of death animals experience in these places. I actually find it quite shocking that bioethicists and health professionals alike haven't taken a strong stand in favor of vegetarian or vegan diets.

It would be easy to say, as a bioethicist or medical researcher, "the ethics of eating animals is outside our purview." To which we might reply, first: If you worry about human well-being, you should be thinking carefully about a vegetarian or vegan diet. Second, we might add: Is there any reason one can't have the energy to worry about both humans and animals? Having empathy and compassion for people doesn't mean you use it up, as if you have some compassion gas tank that is in danger of running dry. Compassion is like love: the more you give, you more you have to give. Compassion for animals and people are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, there is good evidence to suggest that being compassionate toward animals increases a person's capacity for human-to-human empathy and compassion. And this, I think we all would agree, is something we would like to have in abundance in the world of medicine.