Just a simple question for all of you adamantly opposed to animal testing...if nothing were tested on animals, and everything tested on humans instead, are you going to volunteer to try brand new drugs that nobody knows what the results of which could be?

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Didn't think so. What you would get is nobody volunteering to try brand new drugs etc, because they don't know how it will affect them at all. People tend to be self-preserving. So, that means you have to do one of two things. Pay people, in which case the amount of volunteers you will need, and the cost of paying them all would be so cost-prohibitive that nothing innovative gets done (not to mention the plethora of legal issues that would arise should a volunteer suffer medical problems) OR, you draft people to be testers. Private companies cannot simply snatch people off of the streets, so that is a problem right there, and if they did, who would be snatched? The homeless, the poor, the people nobody will miss in case something goes wrong. Is that what we need? A society in which by virtue of being poor or homeless, you are forced to endure experimentation?


Ummm...actually, yes it has.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivorous_plant

And, if you don't want to count insects as animal life, you still have all of the animals killed by consuming poisonous plants. Poisonous plants developed a specific mechanism designed to either harm or kill animals that try to eat it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_poisonous_plants

The French Sim - wow. Just wow. I had never seen that idea before! Lets face it, even if you renamed fish sea kittens, people would still know that they were fish. Wouldn't make a blind bit of difference most likely. PETA do tend to ruin their good, vaguely sensible, grounded in the real world campaigns by coming up with random stuff like this........

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Davious - I think I'd rather stick to animal testing, thanks.

Dreamydre15, I agree that animal testing can be horrible, but the key words are CAN BE. It can also be carried out more humanely, and in my opinion the end results are worth the suffering. The video you linked to is disturbing, but I would rather see more laws regarding animal welfare in testing labs (which there are now, that place would be illegal under EU law for at least 7 reasons that I counted watching that video). That way we still have the gains from animal testing, but without as many costs (I'm talking mental/physical etc costs here, not financial).

Why don't people grow stronger immune systems?
Doctors weaken human immune systems by trying to solve one problem.
One day after all these new drugs are made up, the human wont be able to stop the common cold without drugs.

...for all the wrong reasons
i.e testing cosmetics and household cleaners.
We have advanced greatly with the help of animal research, you take that away we will be back to square one.

If they won't do it on humans, why do it on animals? They have their rights. In practice, as everyone knows, animals are not routinely treated well by animal experimenters. Apart from the fact that millions of animals die each year in experiments, others are often not adequately anesthetized and are abused by handlers and experimenters. It is idealistic to suppose that this will ever stop as long as society endorses vivisection.



Understood but is it so hard for them to be treated well?

Because people aren't willing to let people die of things that can be treated! If I was ill, and could be treated, I would rather take the medication than die and remove myself from the gene pool. Wouldn't most people??

I basically agree with everything longears15 said. I'm for animal testing for medical and scientific purposes (not for cosmetic as it completely unecessary). Without it we wouldn't have made half of the advancements in medicine and science that we have, and these advancements are for good causes - it's saving people's lives and finding cures for deadly diseases.

Just out of curiosity, those of you who don't agree with it for any purpose, how willing would you be (or have you already) to volunteer yourself for medical/scientific research? And to what level? Would you volunteer yourself for something that has unknown or potentially highly dangerous risks?

Those of you in the UK might remember this case:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4807042.stm
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...are-470079.html
A hospital in London were conducting drug trials on humans back in 2006. Six men were tested on and as a result of the they all suffered organ failure. Luckily, they all recovered, but this is just one case where testing has gone wrong.
With regards to the ethics of using humans. IMO, in cases where things do go wrong the implications of it are so much worse than when animals are used.

If you have ever gone to the doctor of your own free will, you invalidate your own argument.

It's sad for anything to die, but I would rather have a monkey die than a human being that would be dearly missed.

Lettuce doesn't kill animals.
Vegetarians don't walk around eatting random green plants.

Insects aren't animals.


I don't go to the docotor on my own freewill, who would want to?

See my post on the first page. One huge corporation that treats the animals they research on with the best treatment. Not being said for all companies though.

Nope. Hence the new laws that have been passed in the EU. In the EU now, all animals used in testing have to have a certain level of welfare (dependant on species, as different species have different needs). And the deaths in experiments aren't accidental, like it sounds here, because the experimenters have tortchered (sp?) them to death, but because by law they have to be studied after death as well to ensure that they have caught any potential dangers of the medication/chemical/whatever that's being tested.

Have you ever watched t.v. and one of those annoying 5 minute commercials come on?
They are trying to sell this great little drug that solves your bi-polar issues, but can make you die, become dizzy, go blind, have useless limbs, go mentaly disabled, bloodly noses, watery eyes.
Why solve one issue such as, bi-polar and gain some/all/possibly none of those listed and unlisted problems?

I think that most of the time the chances of the majorly bad side-effects occuring are so small that people are willing to take the risk to potentially cure something that they KNOW will make them suffer. The painkillers I take for my back can induce coma or death, but the cahnce of that is about 1 in 1 million, so I take them anyway, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to live my life due to my back problems.

And if I was dying, and there was medication that could cure it, I'd definitely take it, even if it had a small chance of killing me (wouldn't make any difference overall, anyway, as I'd die if I didn't take it), or making me blind or whatever (at least I'd still be alive).

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So, do people think that this sort of system is a more morally acceptable way of doing it?

You get side-effects (not quite like the ones you have listed!) with the majority of drugs. However, the good that the drug does outweighs the bad. Bi-polar is a much, much more serious issue than getting a headache every now and then, and people who have it need treatment. If the treatment has a couple of side-effects so be it - I'm sure the person with bi-polar is willing to make a small-in-comparison sacrifice for the sake of their mental health.

Actually, all new potentially good drugs are tested extensively on humans before you can find them in a pharmacy.

http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/info/understand

Scroll all the way down to What are the phases of clinical trials?.

I avoid everything tested on animals except medications, as those would be difficult to avoid and it is a necessary evil until alternatives are more widespread.

Yup, i know, but is it ok to test them on people who don't have access to proper medical care unless they enter clinical trials? In the UK a lot of people would have receieved treatment anyway, but here volunteering for trials was pretty much their only option.

Go to biology class, insects are animals.


Aside from a lot of the PETA propaganda I've seen in this thread, I'd have to also agree that testing medicines and things that can be beneficial to humans is a necessary evil. If we were to just start testing drugs and the like on humans from the start, we'd have to wait a couple human generations to see if the drug will have any affect on the generations that come after the generation that was tested on. If we didn't test on animals many of the medicines and other things that are tested on animals, we wouldn't even have now

I just don't know why it's perfectly fine to harm animals for human benefit.

Well we could always clone humans to test medications on....oh wait we can't even do that because people say it's unethical/immoral/wrong to clone humans.

that would be a better idea than using animals as test subjects

QFE


I can only say why I think it is. I'm a utilitarian, so the morally right path is that which leads to the least suffering and the most happiness. So, if some animals have to suffer or die to prevent more animals from suffering dying, then so be it. Plus, the death of a person is worse than the death of a non-person like a mouse, right?


I don't think the cloning is wrong. It's the fact that clones are just as much people as you or I that makes it wrong to use them as unwilling test subjects.

Plus, cloning was developed my research on animals anyway, so it's hardly helping the cause.

If you could ensure that clones are born anencephalic (without a brain), then maybe they would be useful for testing some medications (but, you'd still not be able to see any behavioural effects or side-effects as well as you would in animals, and it's really hard to see discomfort in a test subject without behavioural responses to pain).

cloning* humans and then testing on them would be sick, people seem to think the fact that they are cloned would make them any less human and therefore raised just to be killed...
then again, what makes it so much worse than killing animals.

*not that cloning is bad, though I really see no point

What davious meant is "If, when sick, you go to the doctor's without being forcefully dragged there, your argument is invalid".

PS: lol, argument dodging.