http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/08/15/the-debate-should-testing-on-animals-be-banned/
The Debate: Should testing on animals be banned?
· By Laura Davis Last updated: Wednesday, 15 August 2012 at 3:31 pm
Animal welfare charities reacted angrily to news in July that the number of animal experiments rose to a record high in Britain last year – a 40 per cent rise over the last decade.
Last month, Cardiff University defended sewing kittens’ eyes shut, as means to find a cure for lazy eyes. The 1990s saw a campaign to end cosmetics testing Europe-wide, and next year, Europe will introduce a ban on selling newly animal-tested cosmetics, for the first time excluding products that don’t comply.
When it comes to scientific research, however, scientists have defended the use of experiments and said researchers were reducing the amount of animals used per study at a time of rising funding for bio-sciences.
But should animals be used for scientific testing? Alistair Currie, Policy Advisor for PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) argues that 90% of medicines tested on animals fail on humans. He says it is the simple problem of experimenting on different species as well as the ethical concerns that means we should stop any further testing on animals. As a vivisectionist, (a scientist who operates on live animals), Hugh Daley* defends the invaluable research gained. He claims the research follows very strictguidelines tominimize suffering. With increasingly complex health issues, limiting experimentation to unreliable alternatives (stem cell research) would slow or stop progress.
Which do you agree with?
Alistair Currie:Animals are not ours to experiment on
Animals are not ours to use for experimentation. Approximately 90 per cent of medicines that pass tests on animals fail in people, either because they aren’t safe or don’t work. That’s an enormous waste of money, animal lives, scientific resources and hope.
Scientific research may now finally be able to progress into the 21st century because the British public is demanding human-relevant, modern research techniques instead of outdated and unreliable animal tests. The development of cutting-edge non-animal methods that can accurately predict what happens in human beings involves exciting, progressive and effective science – not to mention the fact that it is much kinder to animals. Increasingly, governments, companies and researchers themselves are recognizing that the animal-testing model is broken and can never be fixed. Why conduct painful and lethal tests on the wrong species when advanced computer and mathematical models, human tissue and cell cultures along with smarter, more focused clinical and epidemic studies can more accurately show us what happens to human bodies with diseases?
The scientific community urgently needs to rethink its historical dependence on cruel and unreliable animal tests and support itself with progressive thinking for a future filled with less suffering for all species.
Alistair Currie is a Policy Adviser for the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in the UK.
Hugh Daley: It’s not about torturing kittens for fun
For an experiment on visual deprivation, scientists sewed one eyelid shut on each of a group of 31 kittens. Clearly, vivisection, or operating on live animals, has an image problem. Kittens are cute! If you read about that story on the internet, wouldn’t you be swayed by the picture? If this experiment was conducted on a less attractive animal (a naked mole rat maybe, or even a pig) would you mind as much? Nobody likes to see an animal in a cage, under the most humane circumstances or otherwise. But we should take care to not allow this to distract us from the core issue.
In and of itself, sewing any animal’s eye shut is cruel. However, it’s whether the benefits gained from doing this outweigh the harm done. It is whether these benefits could have been gained through testing on a lower animal, or even without testing on animals at all. I am confident that almost all animal experiments currently conducted in England are necessary.
In our work we carry out numerous animal procedures. Many are incurable, so the animal never suffers (i.e. remains under anesthesia until death). Some are not, often involving open-chest surgery and recovery from anesthesia. Everything is done to minimize suffering to the animal. We give far better post-operative pain relief to these animals than you may find in a hospital. Society faces increasingly complex health issues and research cannot be delayed by only using currently-unreliable alternatives (such as stem cells).
Hugh Daley* is a postgraduate researcher at Imperial College London, specializing in cardiovascular pathology.