In what way is it exploitative? Animals are not people, there is no way to exploit them!
They have similar brains and experience basic feelings quite similarly to humans.
Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
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Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
#32There's certainly more that could be done to prevent bad or futile research on animals. But there are areas where there is no reasonable way to replace animal testing. How else would you test the safety of a new drug or other chemical? You can't do this in vitro, and going directly into humans is not an acceptable solution in my view.
I mean company can always do better like giving animal better life before testing and not enthusiast after testing? But what happens now? Those animal are tortured, kept in worst condition and after testing is done you know what happens. Most of the testing is not harmful but the way companies handle the testing is worst to animal. If something is going to human probably means it is safe which should mean safe for an…
Is it actually better to keep them alive after testing? I would think many studies could leave them with issues. Not to mention they would just be sitting in a cage somewhere.
Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
#33In what way is it exploitative? Animals are not people, there is no way to exploit them!
That's a viewpoint that's up there with "babies can't feel pain", which was also common until the end of the last century[1], but has completely vanished since then. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_babies
Do they circumcise boys without anesthetic under similar pretense?
Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
#34TLDR: instead of testing on animals we should use computer simulations and tissue cultures instead. The authors comparison of kernel bugs to lab testing mice is ridiculous to be honest. The author cherry picks examples like cosmetics to justify their view, failing to acknowledge a long history of successful testing on animals that led to drugs that help reduce human suffering. All in all I think the post is bad
"we should use computer simulations"
As much as I like technology, I would be afraid to use a drug that was only tested this way or even in cultured tissue. The biological system is too complex with too many unknown factors for me to believe this is highly effective method for everything.
Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
#35As an academic who isn't directly involved in anything close to animal testing (I'm a physicist) I always find it strange that people working in biology have to jump through incredible hoops relating to how the animals they work with are treated, but then the lunch place in the biology department sells sandwiches with chicken, ham etc in with incredibly minimal oversight for how the animals are treated.
The difference in standards between "science animals" and "food animals" is quite stark. It is very similar to the difference in treatment people require between dogs and pigs. No one really cares if pigs suffer, even though they would be furious if dogs experienced the same treatment.
Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
#36Still a better usage of an animal life than eating them. I prefer to advance humanity, even minimally. If you put these numbers in comparison to animal farming, their suffering and their murdering, then it's absolutely worth it. For me it boils down to a simple set of questions. Would you murder 10'000 chickens to save your grandma's life? How about 10'000 cows? How about 10'000 rats? How about 10'000 rabbits? How ab…
Well, how many other humans would you murder to save your grandma's life? Or your wife, your children, someone you love?
What about terminally ill humans who have What about humans who are "not productive"? People who have been sentenced to more than 10 years?
You might draw the line at other species. Someone else might draw it differently to not do experiments on intelligent species like whales, dolphins and primates (who are used in lab experiments too). Or someone might include the categories I mentioned above in the list of test subjects.
The big second question is the effectiveness of transferring the results of tests from animals to humans. Coldly speaking, while there are experiments that yield useful results on animals, there are also extremely pointless experiments that are done for the sake of doing.
I won't go on and on but to your statement about " I am willing to sacrifice an insane amount of animal lives in order to save anyone human", would you do it to save Hitler (who is a proxy for someone who, maybe, you should think twice about saving)?
I agree with you about replacing the meat industry but we can do multiple things as a species at the same time. We can work on replacing the meat industry, working on alternate ways of testing drugs, on understanding animal communications and language (and we keep finding new indicators of intelligence) and on reducing our footprint as we get technologically and hopefully culturally more sophisticated.
Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
#37There's certainly more that could be done to prevent bad or futile research on animals. But there are areas where there is no reasonable way to replace animal testing. How else would you test the safety of a new drug or other chemical? You can't do this in vitro, and going directly into humans is not an acceptable solution in my view.
I mean company can always do better like giving animal better life before testing and not enthusiast after testing? But what happens now? Those animal are tortured, kept in worst condition and after testing is done you know what happens. Most of the testing is not harmful but the way companies handle the testing is worst to animal. If something is going to human probably means it is safe which should mean safe for an…
better animal life means higher research cost, drives drug price up, delays research speed, end up "costing" human lives, so which is more important ?
Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
#38Still a better usage of an animal life than eating them. I prefer to advance humanity, even minimally. If you put these numbers in comparison to animal farming, their suffering and their murdering, then it's absolutely worth it. For me it boils down to a simple set of questions. Would you murder 10'000 chickens to save your grandma's life? How about 10'000 cows? How about 10'000 rats? How about 10'000 rabbits? How ab…
I don’t understand, you’re willing to kill tens of thousands of animals to save a single person, but are against meat consumption- an activity that inherently provides nutrients to sustain a human life?
Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
#39Can it be made more effective?
Maybe by using a different animal, such as a human
Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
#40> try to imagine that we live in a world where no one has ever used animals in research before, and someone proposes it for the very first time
Why do I have to imagine? We live in that world. At some point in our history people decided to use animals in research.
It seems like this is a slight-of-hand - it's asking us to imagine ourselves, now in that environment. But most of us are far removed from hunting, killing animals for food, raiding, etc. and don't live in a time where most kids died before adulthood and where pricking your thumb on a rose could cause an infection leading to death.
In our history, we know that people treated other people pretty poorly, and animals even worse. There was no problem in using animals in research.
> Even if you can find one particular invention – insulin is often brought up
Manned flight and space travel were both preceded by animal experiments.
The first unmanned balloon flight had a sheep, a duck, and a rooster - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ballooning#First_un... : "The sheep was believed to have a reasonable approximation of human physiology."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeys_and_apes_in_space comments "Before humans went into space in the 1960s, several other animals were launched into space, including numerous other primates, so that scientists could investigate the biological effects of spaceflight."
A few examples drawn from medical history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Barnard - "Barnard performed experiments on dogs while investigating intestinal atresia ... Barnard was able to reproduce this condition in a fetus puppy ... Jannie Louw used this innovation in a clinical setting, and Barnard's method saved the lives of ten babies in Cape Town. This technique was also adapted by surgeons in Britain and the US."
Same page - "Gil Campbell who had demonstrated that a dog's lung could be used to oxygenate blood during open-heart surgery. (The year before Barnard arrived, Lillehei and Campbell had used this procedure for twenty minutes during surgery on a 13-year-old boy with ventricular septal defect, and the boy had made a full recovery.)"
I picked Barnard because I know he was one of several doctors who practiced on dogs to get experience on how to do human open heart surgery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Kantrowitz - "Using dogs and other animals as experimental subjects, Kantrowitz developed an artificial left heart, an early version of an oxygen generator for use as a component in a heart-lung machine and a treatment for coronary artery disease"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C - guinea pigs were discovered to be a good laboratory animal model for scurvy and the identification of vitamin C. Note that while Lind did human testing to identify that citrus fruits prevented scurvy, that didn't pinpoint vitamin C.