Why animal testing (might) offer the best chance for answers

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I really hate to say it, but until we develop a more reliable, accurate, animal-free way to model the effects of chemicals and procedures on living creatures, it would appear that animal testing remains our best bet as we strive for life-saving medical advances.

Now, before you decide to tar and feather and run me out of town, my fellow animal lover, just think about all the millions of lives saved each year with drugs and biomedical procedures developed after being tested mice, rabbits, dogs, monkeys, and other helpless animals.  Would you prefer that we stop making medical and scientific advances until we discover a better way to test them?  I don’t think you really want that.

Animal testing is terrible and awful and sad (try to read Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation” and see if you don’t bawl your eyes out like I did), but I bet nearly all of us know someone who has lost a loved one to a disease that may one day be cured through discoveries made in animal testing.  In my opinion, the future possibility of saving someone’s brother or grandmother from dying is worth the sacrifice of some, even many, innocent animals.  I feel awful about admitting that, because I do love animals and never want to see them harmed, but the truth is I love my grandmother more than I love hundreds of rabbits I’ve never met.  I think you know what I’m getting at.

But let’s hurry up and develop the non-animal, non-human testing model, ok?  Ready, set, GO SCIENTISTS! GO!

THE ISSUE OF whether science should experiment on animals is in the news again. Many people, including many scientists, have mixed feelings about using animals in research and awkward ethical questions arise, but enormous advances in biological and biomedical research have resulted from experimentation on animals.

Ethical questions include: Is it ethical to allow human and animal diseases to continue for which cures could be found through painless research on animals? Is it ethical to perform painful experiments on animals where these experiments lead to cures for human disease or to new and better treatments? And is it ethical to experiment on animals when new treatments resulting from these experiments might not occur for many years, if ever?

Surveys show that most people condone painless research on animals that produce treatments and cures for human disease. But a minority think that such research should be carried out on consenting humans, not on animals. However, most people would not condone research on humans, believing that humans deserve higher moral consideration than animals.

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What do you think about all this?

Related articles from the web:

• How Much Does Animal Testing Tell Us?
• Should we experiment on animals? No
• Response to “Why We Don’t Need Animal Experimentation.”

Tagged as: Animal Liberation, Animal Testing, Animals, Chemicals, Disease, Drugs, Medicine, Peter Singer, research, Science

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