Pro & Con Quotes: Should Animals Be Used for Scientific or Commercial Testing?

“The FDA Modernization Act 2.0, added to the omnibus spending bill, was just passed and has been signed into law by President Biden.

This signals a radical shift in the way drugs and treatments are developed. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will be allowed to consider superior, non-animal drug testing methods, instead of requiring deadly and scientifically bogus animal tests. It’s a change that mirrors a request that PETA scientists made of the FDA in 2020….

PETA’s undercover investigation into laboratory supplier Envigo’s dog-breeding factory led to the release of 4,000 beagles to be adopted into loving homes. But this massive victory is where the real work begins. We must put an end to tests on animals—or else more dogs, cats, mice, monkeys, rabbits, and others will suffer and die in laboratories.”

“We can protect human health and the environment by using cutting-edge, ethically sound science in our decision-making that efficiently and cost-effectively evaluates potential effects without animal testing.”

“Animal research certainly fails animals, in terms of the distress and suffering caused, and just as importantly, animal research often fails people, too, in terms of the slow, unproductive route to useful treatments. More than 90 percent of drugs that have passed animal trials for safety and efficacy are not successful in treating the human disease for which they are intended…

[S]urely we can all agree that replacement of animals in testing and research is morally, ethically and scientifically the only way forward.”

“It is a tremendous relief to hear that Johns Hopkins University will finally begin using up-to-date, human-relevant methods to teach human medicine. This change will align Johns Hopkins’ medical education program with 99 percent of the country’s programs…

[T]he use of animal labs is unmistakably contrary to the intention to provide an excellent medical education. Modern medical simulators provide a superior way to learn surgical skills that are specific to human anatomy and physiology.

To prepare future physicians for the work they will perform throughout their careers, medical training must be human-focused, not animal-focused, because there are many substantial differences across species.”

“Not only are animals poor models of safety for humans, but they are also unreliable for demonstrating the effectiveness of treatments too. Just as many drugs fail in clinical trials because they turn out to cause side-effects in humans, many others turn out to be ineffective in humans, despite performing well in animals. This makes drug development extraordinarily expensive because companies need to recoup the costs of clinical trials not only for successful drugs, but also for the nine others that fail for each one that succeeds…

[F]ar from jeopardizing progress, a shift to advanced techniques based on human biology would accelerate biomedical research, and deliver safer and better medicines at lower costs: a win–win situation that should be supported by everyone.”

“In the name of science or medicine, animals are subjected to countless invasive, frightening and sometimes very painful procedures. We all want to see cures for terrible diseases such as Parkinson’s (which afflicted my mother), cancer (to which I lost my husband), multiple sclerosis and so on, but regardless of how much or how little these experiments benefit human health, should we exploit animals in this way?

Animal experimenters often justify such research by claiming the existence in humans of some morally relevant characteristics, such as intelligence, language, or consciousness, that are supposedly absent in other species. But we are fast discovering a great deal about high levels of intelligence in many animal species, and too about animal consciousness, emotions and sensitivity to pain…

We need a new mindset for the 21st century. Most experimenters, while acknowledging that animals are sentient and sometimes sapient beings, say that some will always have to be used but they will use as few and treat them as well as possible. Instead, let us admit that the practice is morally and ethically unacceptable. We need to move on.

The amazing human brain has already discovered astonishingly innovative ways of improving medical research by replacing animals. Let science direct its collectively awesome intellect toward finding alternatives to the use of live animals in all procedures—as soon as possible. This should be supported by the scientific establishment and vastly increased funding should be found for it. It should be a goal for all civilised societies.”

“Aside from the ethical issues they pose—inflicting both physical pain as well as psychological distress and suffering on large numbers of sentient creatures—animal tests are time- and resource-intensive, restrictive in the number of substances that can be tested, provide little understanding of how chemicals behave in the body, and in many cases do not correctly predict real-world human reactions. Similarly, health scientists are increasingly questioning the relevance of research aimed at ‘modeling’ human diseases in the laboratory by artificially creating symptoms in other animal species.

Trying to mirror human diseases or toxicity by artificially creating symptoms in mice, dogs or monkeys has major scientific limitations that cannot be overcome. Very often the symptoms and responses to potential treatments seen in other species are dissimilar to those of human patients. As a consequence, nine out of every 10 candidate medicines that appear safe and effective in animal studies fail when given to humans. Drug failures and research that never delivers because of irrelevant animal models not only delay medical progress, but also waste resources and risk the health and safety of volunteers in clinical trials.”

“I believe I am not interested to know whether Vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn’t. To know that the results are profitable to the race would not remove my hostility to it. The pains which it inflicts on unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, & is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.”