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COMMENTS:
Experimenting on animals? A necessary evil?
I have no problems with performing medical experiments on animals, as long as they take all possibly steps to avoid unneccessary suffering.
Cosmetics? I have a few more qualms with that.
How many times must the same caustic chemical be put into the eyes or on the skin of a puppy or piglet to prove anything?
There's a difference between finding a solution to diebetes and finding the side effects of hair spray in my book.
Mixed. I echo shark_bite's comment -- for cosmetic experimentation, it is inexcusable.
For legitimate medical research ... that is far more important, but I can't help believing there is a better way that we just haven't found yet.
Unfortunately in some cases of medical research it is still needed. Most research facilities have pretty strict guidelines on animal research as they are very aware of the potential for negative publicity. There is a simple way of eliminating most research using animals - don't buy products (especially hair products) that do not specifically say that they have not been tested on animals.
I'm sorry if some people don't like this view, but I'm willing to tolerated some tightly regulated testing on animals where unnecessary suffering is minimized in order to save potentially 100s of thousands of humans from dying or suffering from diseases such as cancer or AIDS.
My wife's heavily involved in medical research, and the contention of her and her colleagues is that, yes, sadly, it is needed for certain types of testing that just can't be duplicated by computer modeling or other surrogates--despite what the largely ill-informed PETA types claim. Besides, if you know anything about lab protocol, it is a *very* laborious process obtaining animals for testing--much time and paperwork's required and they are subject to government oversight as to their methods. It's not like some kind of Dr. Frankenstein/Fu Manchu sort of affair, as anyone with any experience or contacts in the field knows.
We do recoil in righteous indignation about animals being used for purposes that benefit humans -- and yet, most of us eat beef, pork, poultry, and fish. We KILL these animals so that we may eat. And the conditions many of these animals lived under before they are slaughtered for our appetites are often brutal and cruel.
Here's a picture I want you to consider the next time you sit down for a steak: Cattle are kept in overcrowded pens while they wait for the slaughter. Then they are poked and prodded up a long shute where a steel hammer awaits them. As they move up, they realize they are about to be killed and stark terror is in their eyes and then they are brought into the killing pen and a the steel stud crushes their skull. Then they are put on hooks and moved to areas where their hide is stripped, their guts spilled, and then cut up into edible portions.
So, lest we imagine ourselves noble in calling for ending the "animal cruelty" in testing, remember your "food" is obtained principally from the death of other forms of life
What's for dinner isn't "beef," it's a dead cow. And we killed it with our heartless appetites for its carcass.
They can come up with a better way. They just aren't trying hard enough.
Although I agree out of hand that experimenting on animals for frivolous (i.e. cosmetic purposes) is unnecessary, there are still many situations in which animal testing is the best course of action--as has been mentioned.
For example, the brains of rats and humans are very different, yet they still share many of the same fundamental brain structures. "Safe" and extremely valuable pharmaceutical data can be obtained using test animals, before, say, a particular drug is administered to humans. In fact, the only way to calculate the LD50 of a given drug (Lethal Dose at which 50% of subjects die) is to use animals. And this is crucial information if the drug in question is to find its way into widespread human use.
Testing on animals does not always have to involve putting them through intense pain and suffering; but as long as we humans consider our lives more valuables than animals, it will have to be a necessary evil.
I think it is possible to experiment on animals 'ethically' -- by which I mean putting them through the minimum amount of physical discomfort necessary to achieve the desired scientific result.
No valid discovery has ever come from experimenting on animals: Thoreau said everything we learn fron nature is by observing not tampering with it.
It would be better to test it on a rat instead of a human and giving the human something like cancer instead. Unless its like cosmetics than that shouldnt be aloud.
" I think it is possible to experiment on animals 'ethically' -- by which I mean putting them through the minimum amount of physical discomfort necessary to achieve the desired scientific result."
I concur with everything Applerod said. The PETA crowd would have you believe that the physiology of animals is so very different from humans that any results obtained from medical tests upon non-human subjects would be worthless, but that is not the consensus of medical experts. Yes, there are dissenters, but their opinions are not those of the majority nor do they reflect the viewpoint of the most prominent peer-reviewed medical journals.
Still, I do agree: that this is a necessary evil as of present, doesn't mean that we shouldn't do everything possible to relieve the suffering of the subject animals as much as possible. Having edited a number of my wife's journal submissions, I find it significant that the phrase the researchers use to decribe disposing of an animal subject is "to sacrifice," which I think is a very apt expression and should be the proper attitude of anyone dealing with test animals. We're imposing on them to better the lives of our fellow human beings, not as a wanton exercise. I wouldn't be comfortable with any other attitude.
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