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Animal Testing 101

2 additions to document , most recent over 5 years ago

When Why
Oct-13-18 About Animal Testing: Humane Society Internationall
Oct-13-18 Experimentation: Animal Equality

Right now, millions of mice, rats, rabbits, primates, cats, dogs, and other animals are locked inside barren cages in laboratories across the country. They languish in pain, suffer from extreme frustration, ache with loneliness, and long to be free.

Instead, all they can do is sit and wait in fear of the next terrifying and painful procedure that will be performed on them. The complete lack of environmental enrichment and the stress of their living situation cause some animals to develop neurotic types of behavior such as incessantly spinning in circles, rocking back and forth, pulling out their own fur, and even biting themselves. After enduring a life of pain, loneliness, and terror, almost all of them will be killed.

There are many non-animal test methods that can be used in place of animal testing. Not only are these non-animal tests more humane, they also have the potential to be cheaper, faster, and more relevant to humans.

While some of the experimentation conducted on animals today is required by law, most of it isn’t. In fact, a number of countries have implemented bans on the testing of certain types of consumer goods on animals, such as the cosmetics-testing bans in the European Union, India, Israel, New Zealand, Norway, and elsewhere.

Millions of Animals Suffer and Die in Testing, Training, and Other Experiments

More than 100 million animals suffer and die in the U.S. every year in cruel chemical, drug, food, and cosmetics tests as well as in medical training exercises and curiosity-driven medical experiments at universities. Animals also suffer and die in classroom biology experiments and dissection, even though modern non-animal tests have repeatedly been shown to have more educational value, save teachers time, and save schools money. Exact numbers aren’t available because mice, rats, birds, and cold-blooded animals—who make up more than 99 percent of animals used in experiments—are not covered by even the minimal protections of the Animal Welfare Act and therefore go uncounted.

Examples of animal tests include forcing mice and rats to inhale toxic fumes, force-feeding dogs pesticides, and dripping corrosive chemicals into rabbits’ sensitive eyes. Even if a product harms animals, it can still be marketed to consumers. Conversely, just because a product was shown to be safe in animals does not guarantee that it will be safe to use in humans.

Taxpayer and Health Charities’ Dollars Fund Experiments on Animals

Animals are also used in toxicity tests conducted as part of massive regulatory testing programs that are often funded by U.S. taxpayers’ money. The Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Toxicology Program, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are just a few of the government agencies that subject animals to crude, painful tests.

The federal government and many health charities waste precious dollars from taxpayers and well-meaning donors on animal experiments at universities and private laboratories, instead of supporting promising clinical, in vitro, epidemiological, and other non-animal studies that could actually benefit humans.

DMU Timestamp: September 17, 2018 17:21

Added October 12, 2018 at 4:26pm by Raine Padawer
Title: About Animal Testing: Humane Society Internationall

What's wrong with animal testing?

For nearly a century, drug and chemical safety assessments have been based on laboratory testing involving rodents, rabbits, dogs, and other animals. 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 "modelling" 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.

What's the alternative?

If lack of human relevance is the fatal flaw of "animal models," then a switch to human-relevant research tools is the logical solution. The National Research Council in the United States has expressed its vision of “a not-so-distant future in which virtually all routine toxicity testing would be conducted in human cells or cell lines”, and science leaders around the world have echoed this view.

The sequencing of the human genome and birth of functional genomics, the explosive growth of computer power and computational biology, and high-speed robot automation of cell-based (in vitro) screening systems, to name a few, has sparked a quiet revolution in biology. Together, these innovations have produced new tools and ways of thinking that can help uncover exactly how chemicals and drugs disrupt normal processes in the human body at the level of cells and molecules. From there, scientists can use computers to interpret and integrate this information with data from human and population-level studies. The resulting predictions regarding human safety and risk are potentially more relevant to people in the real world than animal tests.

But that’s just the beginning. The wider field of human health research could benefit from a similar shift in paradigm. Many disease areas have seen little or no progress despite decades of animal research. Some 300 million people currently suffer from asthma, yet only two types of treatment have become available in the last 50 years. More than a thousand potential drugs for stroke have been tested in animals, but only one of these has proved effective in patients. And it’s the same story with many other major human illnesses. A large-scale re-investment in human-based (not mouse or dog or monkey) research aimed at understanding how disruptions of normal human biological functions at the levels of genes, proteins and cell and tissue interactions lead to illness in our species could advance the effective treatment or prevention of many key health-related societal challenges of our time.

Modern non-animal techniques are already reducing and superseding experiments on animals, and in European Union, the "3Rs" principle of replacement, reduction and refinement of animal experiments is a legal requirement. In most other parts of the world there is currently no such legal imperative, leaving scientists free to use animals even where non-animal approaches are available.

DMU Timestamp: September 17, 2018 17:21

Added October 12, 2018 at 4:30pm by Raine Padawer
Title: Experimentation: Animal Equality

Hundreds of millions of nonhuman animals are used as resources or research models every year in experimentation in universities and laboratories throughout the world. Rats and mice, hamsters, rabbits, gerbils, dogs, cats, pigs, cows, sheep, reptiles, trout, primates, a diversity of bird species and many others suffer our experiments of biology, biochemistry, physiology and psychology…

We inoculate them with viruses, alter their DNA, impregnate them and kill the pregnant mothers so we can study their fetuses, we submit them to starvation or electric shocks to test their resistance, burn them alive, apply irritants to their eyes and skin, we block their glands, force them to inhale toxic substances, provoke paralysis, submit them to radiation and extreme temperatures...

Of all these experiments, those considered most trivial (cosmetics testing for example) tend to be the main targets of criticism, whilst medical experiments tend to go unquestioned by the public due to the benefits they claim for human animals. Nevertheless, all forms of animal experimentation are based on an unfair ideal: the non-equal consideration of the interests and desires of the nonhuman animals involved.

Scientific advancement is one of the foundations of our culture. It implies great benefits for humans, but this advance has certain limits. For example, the majority of society would be against experimentation on humans against their will even if this would lead to great advances in the search for vaccines and cures. The same criteria should also apply to other animals since they, just like us, they are sentient and the emotions and sensations they feel matter to them just as much as ours do to us. Lke us, they don’t want to die and want to enjoy a free life. Using non-consenting, nonhuman animals for experiments to acquire vaccines or cures for humans is just as arbitrary as would be using a certain group of humans (for example white people) to find cures for a different race. The colour of our skin or our eyes, our gender, the species we belong to, are all irrelevant characteristics when we speak of bearing in mind another’s interests in avoiding suffering and enjoying their life. All that is relevant here is the possession of such interests, independent of race, gender, intelligence or the species an individual belongs to.

DMU Timestamp: September 17, 2018 17:21





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