I don't believe in this at all. When you at first are under the brainwash process you may think it is necessary.

The sad thing about it all from my emotional viewpoint is that it is not the animals being tested but the humans. Really I don't know why God or whatever is there let's it go on. It is so obvious that it is wrong. I love to see kids that have gotten interested in stopping it. Seeing kids at UCLA going about trying to shame the university with their stupid experiments on helpless animals is great. It is stopped I think the product testing in England. It is an archaic method of doing things.

The trouble is on these things that funding is available. Many animals are tested over and over again. The one test is not really necessary. It is a way to make money and they use it.

People who are very afraid and think it will save even one person think it is ok. There can be many arguments on the side of medical testing but they are all mainly phony. There are so many stupid experiments in psychology books that it makes me sick.

I am so glad that it is being worked on. I try to use products that are not tested on animals for testing. Certain companies testing are ridiculous. Revlon had stopped it from people protesting. It is supposed to be.

The stupid experiments at the Museum of Natural History in NY where cats and kittens were experimented on. They looked at them for sex. Finding out what will happen if a kitten is blind. They were stopped.

The Univ. in Penn that was closed down for testing cars with apes. They had tapes of them laughing as they tested the apes and were hurt or died.

It is just like their own experiment of who will give a person pain if someone tells them to. Animal testing will ultimately not help them.

"I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't...The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further."-Mark Twain

The European Union is banning animal cosmetic testing and doing good. It is also banning products from other countries that are tested. Maybe that will make them sit up and take notice. I copied it off the other review links I was so excited.

Vivisection is a cruel action from one sentient being (humans) to another, (animals). Vivisection implies that we; with our emotions, our ability to reason and our capacity for pain, are more important than another creature with emotions, the ability to reason and a capacity for pain.
300 years ago doctors were treating heart attacks with leaches and putting contraptions around our genetalia that looked like it only belonged in the closets of the craziest sado-masochists. (http://www.collectmedicalantiques.com/quack4.html be sure to check out the spermatoria ring and the vaginal washer) animal testing may have served a useful purpose back in those days. However, we have evolved since then. Surgons no longer operate without first sterilizing
the equipment or amputate limbs without anesthesia. Medical Practice has evolved since then, so why haven't we?
Ethics aside, there are many limitations to vivisection that many of its supporters fail to consider.
To start, there is the obvious fact that humans, while animals, are physically different from many of the other animals that scientists test on. Remember phen-phen, was a great diet pill, many rats lost weight and suffered no side effects. Better put those pills on the market! whoops, turns out it killed people. Why? Apparently, rats and people are not the same. Want further evidence that animal testing is not the most reliable method? Unfortunately, I have several examples. TGN 1412 in the U.K. nearly killed many of the humans it was approved for.
Many toxicity tests seriously underestimate the human risk. Human sensitivity can be as much as 2,000 times greater than that of animals. They also fail to consider that the "information obtained from conventional acute toxicity studies is of little or no value in the pharmaceutical development process" (1)
Additionally, Tests in both rats and rabbits failed to detect the developmentally toxic effects of PCBs, ACE-inhibiting drugs, and other substances, and rabbits gave false negative results for toluene, tetracycline, diethylstilboestrol (DES), and other drugs (2)
Many tests did not detect the hazards of asbestos, benzene, bromodichloromethane, cigarette smoke, dichlorovos, lindane, DDT, selenium sulfide, and many other substances, delaying consumer warnings and worker protection measures by decades in some cases.(3)
Many biological mechanisms leading to cancer in rodents are irrelevant to humans (e.g., buildup of a2u-globulin in the kidneys of male rats, peroxisome proliferation in rodent livers, calcium phosphate-containing urinary buildup in rats) (4)
Rodents possess cancer-prone organs for which there are no human equivalents (e.g., forestomach, Harderian gland, Zymbal's gland) (5)
Animals are sometimes administered 100-times or more the equivalent human intake of a chemical (e.g., to consume the level of the pesticide Alar that was fed to rats and mice in one study would require eating 28,000 pounds of apples daily for 10 years) (5)
Commonly used strains of rats and mice are highly prone to spontaneous tumor development—even "control" animals who are not administered a test chemical—which confounds the interpretation of test results (6).
As a direct consequence of shortcomings cited above, pharmaceutical regulators have reported that fully 92% of drugs that pass preclinical (animal) testing fail clinical trials, because animal studies so often "fail to predict the specific safety problem that ultimately halts development" (7).

Seven different sources all confirm that animal testing is not the most accurate means to gather such important information. But if that is not enough, here is a quote from the FDA itself (Challenge and Opportunity on the Critical Path to New Medical Products. Bethesda, MD: FDA. 2004)
"Currently available animal models, used for evaluating potential therapies prior to human clinical trials, have limited predictive value in many disease states." As Joshua Lederberg stated "The one or two or three hundred millions of dollars a year that we're now spending on routine animal tests are almost all worthless from the point of view of standard setting... [I]t is simply not possible with all the animals in the world to go through new chemicals in the blind way that we have at the present time, and reach credible conclusions about the hazards to human health. We are at an impasse. It is one that has deep scientific roots, and we had better do something about it."
In an attempt to put a face on the atrocities that we are commiting I have helpfully submitted links with pictures. DO NOT CLICK IF YOU ARE SQUEAMISH! DO NOT CLICK IF YOU ARE SQUEAMISH!
http://www.poppypalin.org/vivisection.jpg
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://liber ationbc.org/files/dog-res-01.jpg&imgrefurl=http://liberationbc.org/issues /vivisection&usg=__-uJp7O8XtUdvjV1ESgSlnnNHfaw=&h=389&w=500& ;sz=26&hl=en&start=5&um=1&tbnid=65K xHkWSR_dZ6M:&tbnh=101&tbnw=130&prev=/im ages%3Fq%3Dvivisection%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.k inshipcircle.org/columns_articles/images/pict_vivis ection.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.kinshipcircle.o rg/columns_articles/topic_experimentation.html& usg=__LYPWYy7O5IEy7cGMCTnlz9Y96oE=&h=319&w= 237&sz=133&hl=en&start=7&um=1&t bnid=oaW0qHzwQzkrxM:&tbnh=118&tbnw=88&p rev=/images%3Fq%3Dvivisection%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26 um%3D1
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.k inshipcircle.org/columns_articles/images/pict_vivis ection.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.kinshipcircle.o rg/columns_articles/topic_experimentation.html& usg=__LYPWYy7O5IEy7cGMCTnlz9Y96oE=&h=319&w= 237&sz=133&hl=en&start=7&um=1&t bnid=oaW0qHzwQzkrxM:&tbnh=118&tbnw=88&p rev=/images%3Fq%3Dvivisection%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26 um%3D1

I am an animal activist and have used these sources, gathered in my 10 + years in studying the subject, in an attempt to keep my emotions out of this. If you are interested in the subject please read the full articles outlined below.

1-Chapman, K. & Robinson, S. (2007). Challenging the requirement for acute toxicity studies in the development of new medicines. London: UK National Centre for the 3Rs.
2-Schardein, J.L. (2000). Chemically Induced Birth Defects, 3rd Ed. Rev. New York: Marcel Dekker.
3-Seidle, T. (2006). Chemicals and Cancer: What the Regulators Won’t Tell You. London: PETA Europe Ltd. 5-
4-Cohen, S.M. (2002). Bioassay bashing is bad science: Cohen’s response. Environ. Health Perspect. 110, A737.
5-American Council on Science and Health. (1997). Of Mice and Mandates: Animal Experiments, Human Cancer Risk and Regulatory Policies. New York: ACSH.
6-Haseman, J.K., Hailer, R.J. & Morris, R.W. (1998). Spontaneous neoplasm incidences in Fischer 344 rats and B6C3F1 mice in two-year carcinogenicity studies: A National Toxicology Program update. Toxicol. Pathol. 26, 428-41.
7-Food & Drug Administration. (2004). Challenge and Opportunity on the Critical Path to New Medical Products. Bethesda, MD: FDA.


By the way, I'm not fond of testing on humans either.

While the use of animals in medical testing may not be a pleasant thought for most people, would you really rather they just skip this step and go straight to testing drugs and procedures on humans?

Reading the comments below makes me think that there are a goodly number of folks that would like to go back to the medical conditions of the seventeenth century.  I wonder how many them would stand by and see their loved ones suffer and die because research was banned.

Experimentation on animals in laboratories generally falls into one of three categoriestoxicity testing, education and training, and basic or applied research.

There are alternatives to this.

sure it's sad, but how many asthmatic computer nerds that seem to be allergic to everything would be alive if not for animal testing? plant testing won't work and human testing on death row inmates is unethical for some reason.

"The more I see of man, the more I like dogs!" ~Madame De Stael. I did not know that this even occured, how sad, it makes me want to cry!!! I thought testing for cosmetics was bad, but this just takes it to the next level!!! With the advancements in the computer industry one would think that they could just simulate these tests!! And open surgery, why the heck do they need to do that? We all know how the human body works...there is such things as cadavers!! I would much rather have a group of students disect a dead human than a living animal! I admit, i am probably very nieve on the subject of medicine research, but to me this is just wrong. There must be another way to get the information that people need without having to kill a living, healthy, animal to do it!

For all those that say an animal's life is worth less than a humans' you are all wrong. We can cure enough diseases already, now we are just screwing with nature even more. People die for natural reasons and so do animals, yet they are the ones that suffer for it. Now people are living longer...GREAT...now the population can increase some more and not give a crap about the enviornment. I just hope that I'm alive to see all of this come smashing back into all of your faces.

Ten years ago I would have disagreed with using animals in medical research. However, now that I work in the medical research field, I understand the importance of animals in drug research and testing. I, personally would feel more comfortable taking a medication knowing that it had been tested first. For those against animal testing, I hope you don't take pain killers, antibiotics, or use birth control...hypocrites.

How opportune that this should come up now as we have just had a case in the Uk whereby a farm breeding guinea pigs for research has been finally closed down because of the activities of animal rights campaigners.(Not by the Government but because they owners are tired of the recriminations of activists). Now I don't condone the violent and persecutory actions of these people, however, neither do I have any sympathy for the owners of this plant who are breeding animals solely for money and without thought of the pain and cruelty that is administered to them afterwards upon sale of said animals to the research laboratories. If the politicians continue to ignore the will of the people in shutting down or banning these places, (and on so many other issues too)I am not surprised that it appears the only recourse for campaigners is to resort increasingly to vandalism or provocative behaviour as a means to do this and to get the message understood. There should never be any need for animals to be used in this way and there is little medical support for such treatment either. Those who feel so strongly in favour of animals being treated (and tormented) for their benefit should maybe volunteer themselves for trials instead. Animals are not secondary creatures to man simply because they can't speak English. In fact,it is the nature of things that those creatures who, for some reason, see themselves as 'higher' have a duty to look after those creatures who are 'lower' and protect them. Otherwise,it's like asking a child to undergo painful tests to find the parent a cure.

Do you people know how many lives are saved every year due to medical research on animals? Without the ability to test different treatments on animals, medical research would screech to a halt. Years worth more of tests and expiriments would have to be done on new drugs before they were ready for their first tests on humans. Animal testing allows scientists to test new drugs and a living bodies reaction to them before they are safe to test on humans. This greatly speeds up the research prosess because no unnesscary time is spent developing a drug over many years only to have it fail on the first human test. Animal testing allows researchers to catch early mistakes and see what works. Lives would be lost and ill people would be cause undue pain because some animal rights lobby values animal lives over people's.

Why torture innocent animals for profit? Besides,they have different body chemistry than humans anyway.Here's another way for convicted Murderers and Rapists to pay their debt to society.

A sad but necessary evil. It's not fair that an animal has to undergo this kind of horror, but I know that there is really no other way for medicine to advance (specifically veterinary medicine) without it. I don't advocate its use in classrooms whose future line of work would not use these techniques (as a biology major, my husband had to take the animal physiology class; unfortunately, he wants to study paleontology, and his cutting up a live animal serves really little purpose when he wants to study animals that are long gone. Especially when pretty much every experiment failed and the animals had to die for no reason, anyway. For those experiments, I think that the computer model of the frog that was readily available could have been used instead without negating the educational value of the act.) A very horrible thing to do, but unfortunately there's no current alternative.

Well if you wish to go back to the medical knowledge of the 17th and 18th Centuries, then ban animal testing.

Doggone it. I'm a neanderthal. Sorry, we've come too far in curing and preventing diseases to stop now and say, Whoa, Ol'Bossie there may have feelin's, y'know? There are laws dealing with animal abuse, mostly having to do with pets, some dealing with labs, and I respect their necessity. But which diseases are not worth sacrificing animals for? A human life saved? Sorry about the animal, but a human saved, numerous human lives saved, outweighs any concern I may have for the animal.

Again, I feel torn. I'd like to think that all testing is done in order to save a lot of human lives (and many times it is!), but too many times the animals are made sick first, in order to see whether a drug works or not. And sometimes it is hard to believe that an animal like a cat or rat is similar enough to a human to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of a drug. Meaning, just because it worked (or didn't) on a lab animal, doesn't mean it will (or won't) work for a human. I do find it to be quite ironic that people get so upset about animal testing (and not all lab animals are treated badly!) and at the same time don't even flinch when you mention the thousands of animals that end up being euthanized because their owners abused, neglected or starved them, or simply didn't want them anymore.

As intimidating as the photos look, this is actually a vital part of medical research. I'm sure none of us would want our parent, children or even ourselves taking medication whose side effects were unknown.

I do find this to be important. I would not want to use a drug that was not tested first.