Vivisection for drug testing / medical research

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 f... Read more

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 experime... Read more

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.

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.

There are alternatives to this.

"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 animal... Read more

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.

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.

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.

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