[YOUTUBE]Mouse relocates her babies - YouTube[/YOUTUBE] You can't say they're not sentient after watching that. So having established that they're sentient, why do those evil scientists continue to perform those horrid experiments on them? It makes me sick. I cried when I saw one repulsive video showing them testing on mice. These scientists are definitely educated enough to know this, yet they continue to experiment on animals. Really, it's no different from sadism if you think about it. Sometimes I wish I could do the things they do to animals on them, though I really hate getting wrapped up in hate, because then I'll be just like them.
...people think that mice aren't sentient? Scientific testing on animals isn't done under the presumption that the animals aren't sentient.
Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive, or be conscious, or to have subjective experiences. Nearly all animals are sentient. The scientists aren't evil; they (should) conduct experiments in a way that maximises the animal's comfort at all times since that gives more accurate results. Testing on animals is a good thing that can benefit other animals as well as humans.
Yes, I got into an argument once with someone who said it was okay to eat cows on the grounds that they aren't sentient. Actually testing on animals has never yielded any productive results. Imagine all the life saving drugs we could have if it weren't for animal testing. Animal testing is flawed because the scientists kill guinea pigs by giving them high doses. Quite frankly, testing on humans would be more effective, although I'd be opposed to any type of cruelty. Its basis is inherently flawed, because say doctors invent a cure for cancer in mice. That doesn't help humans in any way, because the cells we have are different from theirs. Our bodies naturally react differently to treatment, something that further complicates research on curing diseases. Due to having such different biology, it's illogical to expect testing on mice to be a successful means of finding a cure to cancer. It doesn't benefit animals, nor does it benefit humans. All it does is kill millions of animals and thousands of people annually, and if we stopped testing on animals, odds are we'd already have gotten a lot more miracle drugs. If we used drugs that were approved for mice on people, then we could likely save them from dying of cancer. Aside from being cruel, animal testing is wasteful, ineffective and a drain on the tax payer's money. I'd like to see a cure for cancer, diabetes, and everything else, but animal testing won't produce it.
I'm not saying that I agree with animal testing (or that I disagree, for that matter), but saying that no advancements have been made due to animal testing is absurd. Almost every medical advancement has been based on animal testing. A very small selection of concrete examples: basic body physiology discoveries such as blood pressure and electrical impulse in the 17th century, which form the basis for healthcare, were essentially entirely due to animal testing discovery of insulin, used to keep people with diabetes alive, was made due to testing on dogs in 1921 having anaesthetics that don't kill you, which allow several hundred thousand life-saving operation per year, is because they were first tested on animals to see if they were safe any cloning efforts and, since "can it cure cancer?" seems to be the litmus test for whether any scientific endeavor is worth doing: chemotherapy was developed due to testing on mice in the mid-20th century
I am really confused. Do you understand why animal testing is done? Without it, many more people (I haven't a source for a figure, but I'd reckon thousands at least) would die each year from taking unsafe, untested drugs in the wrong doses. I don't have any problem with eating cows, but that's not because they are or aren't sentient, it's because a lot of animals eat other animals and I don't see why we should be vegetarian when we've evolved as omnivores. I object to the modern meat industry, sure, but that's separate. Completely false; what kind of source are you even using? We would have far fewer without animal testing. Animal testing helps us know if a drug is safe or not; if we skipped animal testing, we might have more drugs but they'd be ineffective or even deadly. Animal testing saves lives and helps us create good drugs. Scientists don't intentionally kill anything though animal testing. They try to work out a safe and effective dosage by calculating what they know of the drug and then using a variety of reasonable ones on animals to see what works best. If an animal dies, it's accidental and unpredictable. I see the alternative as being to not find good dosages and thereby having humans die because of too high/low doses. Every drug is tested on humans, extensively, before going to market. Human testing is a very important stage and allows more precision and relevance than animal testing, but you can't get to that stage without animal testing first because otherwise it's just too unsafe for the people. I am also opposed to any type of cruelty, but thankfully neither animal nor human testing requires it. It helps humans because without it, we don't know if the drug is effective at all in any circumstance. It helps humans becase it aids dosage calculations and different types of drug can be tested to see what's effective before having human trials. It helps humans becase although our cells are different to theirs, things can still work across some species boundaries. But we are not 100% different in every way. Research is complicated by the differing reactions, but animal testing helps as it gives us some idea of what to expect from the drug. Yes, which is why scientists don't expect that. They use testing on mice as a stage in developing a drug to combat cancer because it makes human testing safer and it gives them an idea of what the drug does. Please also remember that it isn't just mice -- scientists use different species of animals which are similar to humans in different ways when testing different drugs, as this makes the trials more effective and relevant. When a new drug is developed that has had animal testing as one stage of the process, it does benefit humans. We also have these people called vets who can use types of medicine on animals, e.g. worming tablets on cats. These drugs have definitely gone through trials on animals -- it'd be just plain irresponsible to not do that -- so it does benefit animals. It saves lives. It saves the lives of animals who use the final drug, and of people who are involved in a human testing stage or who use the final drug. It's a good thing that prevents more deaths than it causes. Why on Earth would that be the case? Animal testing helps us find "miracle drugs". Without it, there might be a few more drugs on the market, but they would be incredibly unsafe, unpredictable, and ineffective. I'd rather go to the pharmacy and know that I'm not going to die. "Miracle drugs" will go through animal and human testing and be fine -- the testing stages weed out the ones which aren't miracles and instead cause harm or have no effect. Above, you said: You're contradicting yourself. On the one hand, you say that mice are different from people so drugs that work on mice won't work on people. On the other, you say that if we used mouse drugs on humans then they'd work and we'd save people. What do you mean? As it is, we do use drugs approved for mice on people. The stage of drug developement following analyzing animal testing results is human testing. If the drug passes that stage, then eventually it's likely to be used on people generally. How? Why? In what way? The taxpayer's money is being used well -- to save lives, work out new drugs, save lives, save money on the problems that would arise if we skipped animal testing, and did I mention that it saves lives? On the contrary, such things will not arise without animal testing. Any cure for something like that will have to go through rigorous trials at all points to optimise it in terms of safety and effectiveness. Without animal testing, you're compromising the safety of the humans the drug will be tested on as well as wasting money by doing full human trials on something that may not work at all and would have been weeded out in the animal testing stage. Animal testing isn't this annoying, ineffective thing that stops wonder-drugs from going live. It's a vital part of developing a drug since it stops new drugs from killing people due to unforseen side-effects. A good drug will get through anyway.
Here is the thing. Science operates on testing. Human are not perfect, they make errors,and thay can't always see their error. Testing is done to reduce the chance of errors. You can't just invent some new kind of medicince and say it will work base on theories alone. You have to put it through viogrious testing to understand its effects and unintended side effects in a controlled enviroment before releasing it for mass production. Now, why do scientists choose mice? It is not because they are sadistics that love to torture mice. They only do things very efficiently. Mice is very efficient at being test subjects because: 1) Their DNA sequence his highly similar to human, with study show approximately 85% similarity with human DNA sequence. 2)Mice breed very fast, that is a given. And due to this, sciencetist can study the effects that might only araise a few generations later in a short amount of time. 3) Mice are very easy to handle and maintain, comparing to other animals and human. They require a smaller amount of space and food to live due to their sizes. I believe, the approach here is not to stop animal testing. It is better to treat animal with respect, just like how the native american treat their prey - they treat the animal with respect, as the animal die, so they can all sustain on it and live. The same can be thought of with animal in tests - they are our heroes, not victims.
