A Coin Toss
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Animal testing is less accurate than a coin toss.
Scientists have cured mice of cancer for decades but it didn’t work in humans. At least 80 AIDS vaccines work in animals all have failed in human trials. Every stroke treatment successful in animals has failed in human testing. …animal tests are only applicable to humans less than than 50% of the time. (Source: The Guardian)
Animal tests do not work.
Here’s why animal tests are so inaccurate:
a) animals and humans are different,
b) animal experimentation artificially sickens or injures healthy animals, which influences the experiment,
c) better tests exist, such as tests on human cells.
Even if animal experiments did work, there are ethical reasons against animal testing:
a) it’s wrong to be unnecessarily cruel, animal testing is virtually always unnecessarily cruel,
b) animals have rights, animal testing violates those rights,
c) scientists and medical practitioners have a duty to refrain from harming others: Primum non nocere.
Even if you’re willing to let your medicine be a coin toss, don’t let your ethics. Live a meaningful, honest, compassionate life. Be vegan!
Wish it were possible to say it is amazing that animal testing is still being done, but that would be like saying it is amazing that most people still eat meat.
I think I’m opposed to animal testing, but I’m not quite sure yet; I consider that issue to be the first thing in veganism/AR that rational and well-informed people can come to different opinions on.
It’s a bit unfair, however, to criticize animal testing for being less accurate than a coin toss. If there were two possibilities that we could reasonably expect to be roughly equally likely, we could compare it to a coin toss. But when it comes to medicine, there’s almost no reason to expect any particular medicine to do anything at all, so it’s remarkable when it does.
I don’t like animal testing because it’s cruel; I oppose it for the same reason I oppose human testing (which would be successful far more often, or course). And I’d definitely like to see alternatives developed further so that we can eliminate animal testing. Still, animal testing does sort of work, and it has had some very important successes, so I don’t think it’s a great idea to pretend that it doesn’t do anything at all or is statistically insignificant; non-vegans know that, and I’d really rather we not lose our credibility by making statements of dubious validity.
.-= Simon´s last blog ..Cooking for guests =-.
Simon, any analogy between animal experimentation and gambling will contain some flaws. Intelligent readers, like you, are capable of distinguishing the important pieces of information from the window dressing. The essence of my post above is simple:
Relying on animal experimentation to find cures for cancer and AIDS is a risky gamble that costs animals’ their lives and scientists’ their ethics.
I disagree, Simon, because I think animal testing is something that both vegans and non-vegans are more likely to agree on than perhaps some of the other animal rights issues. And even if animal testing did work in some cases despite the fact that many results are species-specific, ethically, it isn’t justified. Animal testing and research is big business, especially for drug companies, and animal cruelty for the sake of increased dollars has got to stop.
.-= So I’m Thinking Of Going Vegan´s last blog ..so I finally got a vegan backpack! =-.