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

“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.”

“Regardless of any role animal experiments may have played in the past, the mounting evidence shows that using animals today is largely ineffective in helping us understand human physiology, predict human toxins and find useful drugs. Despite some similarities between humans and non-human animals, medicine now deals with the subtle nuances of physiological mechanisms and genetics that are unique to humans. While animals may be ‘whole models,’ they are the wrong whole models because of inter-species differences.

Failures of animal experiments have led to human harm. Moreover, misleading animal experiments may have caused the abandonment of effective drugs and cures. One can’t help wonder: how many people would have been saved if we used more effective human-based testing methods?

Animal experimentation is a relic of the past. Instead of wasting time, human and animal lives, and our tax dollars on misleading animal experiments, we must devote our resources into finding and using sophisticated human-based tests that mimic the whole human body. Our lives depend on this.”

“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.”

“The practice of experimenting on nonhuman animals as it exists today throughout the world reveals the consequences of speciesism. Many experiments inflict severe pain without the remotest prospect of significant benefits for human beings or any other animals. Such experiments are not isolated incidences, but part of a major industry…

We tolerate cruelties inflicted on members of other species that would outrage us if performed on members of our own species. Speciesism allows researchers to regard the animals they experiment on as items of equipment, laboratory tools rather than living, suffering creatures. In fact, on grant applications to government funding agencies, animals are listed as ‘supplies’ alongside test tubes and recording instruments…

The exploitation of laboratory animals is part of the larger problem of speciesism and it is unlikely to be eliminated altogether until speciesism itself is eliminated. Surely one day, though, our children’s children, reading about what was done in laboratories in the 20th Century, will feel the same sense of horror and incredulity at what otherwise civilized people could do that we now feel when we read about the atrocities of the Roman gladiatorial arenas or the eighteenth-century slave trade.”

“There is no reason to continue to use nonhuman animals for scientific or commercial testing. There are ample non-animal alternatives that are readily available that are just as good or better in the Ethical, Economical, and Educational arenas. Many teachers and researchers agree with this point of view.”

“I analysed in detail 27 systematic reviews examining the contributions of animal experiments to human healthcare. Their outcomes are remarkably consistent. Animal studies rarely contribute to the development of clinical interventions effective in human patients.

It’s not hard to fathom why. Animals have a plethora of genetic, biochemical and physiological differences that alter disease progression, drug uptake, distribution and effect. Stressful environments and experiments are common, and distort outcomes. Additionally, numerous studies have revealed scientific flaws in the design of many animal experiments.”

“Most animal experiments are not relevant to human health, they do not contribute meaningfully to medical advances and many are undertaken simply of out [sic] curiosity and do not even pretend to hold promise for curing illnesses. The only reason people are under the misconception that animal experiments help humans is because the media, experimenters, universities and lobbying groups exaggerate the potential of animal experiments to lead to new cures and the role they have played in past medical advances…

Because animal tests are so unreliable, they make… human trials all the more risky. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has noted that 92 percent of all drugs that are shown to be safe and effective in animal tests fail in human trials because they don’t work or are dangerous.  And of the small percentage that are approved for human use, half are relabeled because of side effects that were not identified in animal tests…

Taking a healthy being from a completely different species, artificially inducing a condition that he or she would never normally contract, keeping him or her in an unnatural and distressful environment, and trying to apply the results to naturally occurring diseases in human beings is dubious at best.”

“Scientists use animals in biological and medical research more as a matter of tradition, not because animal research has proved particularly successful or better than other modes of experimentation. In fact, animal ‘models’ have never been validated, and the claim that animals are necessary for biomedical research is unsupported by the scientific literature. Instead, there is growing awareness of the limitations of animal research and its inability to make reliable predictions about human health.

The biomedical research community and its affiliated trade associations routinely attempt to convince the general public, media, and government representatives that the current controversy over the use of animals is a life-and-death contest pitting defenders of human health and scientific advancement against hordes of anti-science, anti-human, emotional, irrational activists. Such a deliberate, simplistic dichotomy is not only false, but ignores the very real and well-documented ethical and scientific problems associated with the use of animal experiments that characterize modern biomedical research, testing, and its associated industries.

The biomedical community would instead be better served by promoting increased funding and research efforts for the development of non-animal models that overcome the pressing ethical and scientific limitations of an increasingly archaic system of animal experimentation.”

“The basis for testing animals prior to human consumption of new medications or releasing new chemicals is that animals offer predictive value for outcomes or conditions in humans. The same is true for using animals in research aimed to find the cause of human disease. In science, predictive value has a very specific meaning and can be calculated. For decades, scientists have known that the positive and negative predictive value for animal models is not useful—the values are so low that scientists know no more about the value or danger of a drug or chemical than they did before testing on animals. Despite this proven lack of value, the process has continued for many reasons. The predictive value of using animals to find causes of, and thereby potential targets for, curing human diseases is even lower. Ethical, human-based research and testing is available and should be more widely implemented.”

“It is possible, in the twenty-first century, to conduct a vast array of experiments without using animals and to derive better results more quickly and at less cost.

Cutting-edge technology has forged new frontiers with the use of lasers, fiber optics, microchips, genomics, computer-based drug design, and digital imaging, to name a few… These methods have contributed to a technological revolution in biomedical research and rendered the reliance on animals outdated.

Scientists have only just begun to tap the potential of these new technologies. Their full potential can never be realized while dependence on animal models persists. Reliance on animals continues, not because it is effective, but due to inertia, lack of training, vested financial interests and adherence to outdated traditions…

If we took a fraction of the resources currently devoted to animal experiments and put those towards developing and expanding non-animal methods, we could vastly reduce the use of animals immediately and pave way for the day that they are no longer used at all.”

“Animals in labs suffer tremendously in the name of science. However, systematic analysis of biomedical literature shows that animals have given us inadequate or erroneous information in human disease and toxicology and that in many cases medical breakthroughs were delayed by dependence on animal models…

Even in a species’ whose DNA is nearly identical to humans, the chimpanzee, gene variations and expression result in vast important differences that render even the chimpanzee an ‘unnecessary’ model to study human health and disease. Species differences exist in the process by which a drug is absorbed, distributed, metabolized, and eliminated, and in the causes, progression, and outcome of diseases. As a result, for example, a mouse may develop cancer in the same location as a human, but they are not the same cancers…

Non-animal methods are superior on all fronts: they are more efficient, accurate, and cost-effective than animal experiments. Using human cell cultures to test toxicity yields 76-84% accurate prediction, illuminates specific organ damage, and other more meaningful results than animal tests which hover around 46-50% accuracy, literally no better than a coin flip.”

“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.”