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Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

erichgrunewald.com

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Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#51

Post by joshuaissac »

cute_boi wrote: post #11
HPsquared wrote: post #3

There are shades of grey on this kind of thing. Testing cosmetics seems a less painful ordeal than some of the more brutal examples given in the article. Another thing. If animal testing was outlawed, the same testing would probably end up being done on poor people instead. Is that worse? I think so.

I think this is a bad take. Poor people will be tested after animal testing so it is not that worst. There are many cases of this one example is [1] Animal testing is unnecessary most of the time. Even when its necessary they are brutally tortured and after testing is over they are simply killed. But you know companies don't think animal deserves to live. We can use simulations etc but you know its hard to change cul…

> Poor people will be tested after animal testing so it is not that worst.

> Animal testing is unnecessary most of the time. Even when its necessary they are brutally tortured

If animal testing involves brutally torturing the test subjects, then surely it would be much worse for poor human test subjects if they are swapped in, compared to what they go through now. Those steps that involve torturous pain would have to happen with the human subjects instead of the animals.

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#52

Post by amelius »

HPsquared wrote: post #3

There are shades of grey on this kind of thing. Testing cosmetics seems a less painful ordeal than some of the more brutal examples given in the article. Another thing. If animal testing was outlawed, the same testing would probably end up being done on poor people instead. Is that worse? I think so.

> Another thing. If animal testing was outlawed, the same testing would probably end up being done on poor people instead. Is that worse? I think so.

Also, some Asian countries would get a huge advantage as they don't seem to care as much about animal rights, unfortunately.

Anyway, it's a bad argument, but one that has to be taken into account as the practice won't stop anyway.

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#54

Post by _Microft »

eigenket wrote: post #49
mjburgess wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not considering opportunity cost. Meat-as-food can be substituted with non-meat products which net lowers suffering. Since "animal" basically means "non-human" in the case of "animal testing", by definition, there is no substitute which net lowers suffering. Humans suffer as least as much as non-human animals.

Also the way trophic levels work humans eating plants is way more efficient as a system than humans eating animals that eat the plants. Humans eating animals eating plants is an ecological disaster.

Add another level of indirection to make it even worse, that is by eating predators that eat other animals. Tuna fish are an example for this.

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#55

Post by refurb »

ekianjo wrote: post #46
fabian2k wrote: post #10

There'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.

> How else would you test the safety of a new drug or other chemical? Use computer models first as much as possible, while we know they are imperfect. In vitro-studies before in-vivo. Then test on volunteers (paid), starting with very very small doses of whatever you want to test to reduce the risk to the maximum, and measure the effects on living systems as you go to better understand how it is metabolized.

As someone who has done drug development this is a horrific idea.

I remember using computer modeling - the lead said “oh yeah, tweak the molecule here and you’ll double the potency”. Cool, make the tweak and…potency was 1/10th.

And we do toxicity filtering already, before we get to animal models (why trying something you know will fail?). Despite this we have plenty of highly toxic molecule make it through. I remember the rats who testicles went necrotic after the first dose. Never saw that coming and thank god it didn’t happen in humans.

We’re so far away from even modeling molecules docking with receptors. Toxicity? You’d have plenty of phase 1 volunteers dying every year. Or being horribly harmed.

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#56

Post by wallscratch »

eigenket wrote: post #35

As 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 differenc…

Yeah, but maybe this is an argument for treating the food animals, rather than ridiculousness of standards for science animals.

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#57

Post by foobar33333 »

ekianjo wrote: post #46
fabian2k wrote: post #10

There'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.

> How else would you test the safety of a new drug or other chemical? Use computer models first as much as possible, while we know they are imperfect. In vitro-studies before in-vivo. Then test on volunteers (paid), starting with very very small doses of whatever you want to test to reduce the risk to the maximum, and measure the effects on living systems as you go to better understand how it is metabolized.

>Use computer models first as much as possible

Are we not doing this already? I would assume this is even cheaper than producing the thing and testing it. And I'm not sure how confident I would be with computer models since we don't know a whole lot about how biology works enough to simulate it (given the simulation would mostly be trying to replicate previous potentially flawed studies)

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#58

Post by bambax »

Specism is based on several flawed assumptions.

We decide humans are superior to other animals because we are humans, and us>them.

We also decide that because we are superior, we have all rights to do anything to members of "inferior" groups.

But:

- Superiority is at least debatable and strongly depends on the criteria used fot comparison;

- There is absolutely no discernable logical link between being "superior" and having a right to do anything to the "inferior" beings. (For example, a human adult is "superior" to a human infant; but it doesn't give them the right to torture it.)

We torture animals because we can, and because we don't think about it. But it won't last, because the more we think about it, the less acceptable it becomes.

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#59

Post by fabian2k »

ekianjo wrote: post #46
fabian2k wrote: post #10

There'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.

> How else would you test the safety of a new drug or other chemical? Use computer models first as much as possible, while we know they are imperfect. In vitro-studies before in-vivo. Then test on volunteers (paid), starting with very very small doses of whatever you want to test to reduce the risk to the maximum, and measure the effects on living systems as you go to better understand how it is metabolized.

What computer models? I can imagine that it is possible to predict some already known toxicological mechanisms for similar molecules. But we're certainly not even close to anywhere where we could predict unknown toxicological interactions.

And in vitro tests are very limited in that area. Of course they're still done and useful, but they can't replace animal tests. And testing on paid volunteers is still ethically problematic, you're targeting pretty desperate people if you remove animal experiments which could detect toxic compounds.

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#60

Post by nceqs3 »

ekianjo wrote: post #46
fabian2k wrote: post #10

There'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.

> How else would you test the safety of a new drug or other chemical? Use computer models first as much as possible, while we know they are imperfect. In vitro-studies before in-vivo. Then test on volunteers (paid), starting with very very small doses of whatever you want to test to reduce the risk to the maximum, and measure the effects on living systems as you go to better understand how it is metabolized.

There is no computer model that is even close to being accurate enough. Science actually understands very little about the human body on a very micro scale.
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