Animal testing

[Moby-Dick]

well when im dead, doctors can have what ever they want of me ...

I dont think they'll need your brain , unless its to prop up a table with.

[XA04]

heheh, I love it when I make a juicy thread like this, I like juicy chicken too!. (Infact I just ate some)


Now back on track.. As I said before I do agree with animal testing for when it benefits humans, but as some others have said when it's used for beauty products and such then it's really out of order.

I think Deludedguy about the fact of using pedophiles, murderers etc. is a GREAT idea, seriously though... there's enough physco's/weirdo's out there for the use.

[Rave]

yes i do eat meat. but its not as if the animals suffer for it. its instant death. not tourture them, so their in pain for the last few months/weeks of their lifes ...

Erm.....yeah. It's not often that I link to pro-vegetarian websites, but have a look here and then tell me that animals used for drug testing suffer more than chickens who stand in their own urine and faeces for 16 weeks eating concentrated feed until (often) they're too fat to stand up.

Several of the pictures you linked to look like they were taken in a vetinary surgery....the cat one especially. Can you give me a link that explains precisely what kind of research involves sedating a cat and cutting it open when it's alive?

My grandad died of cancer ... nothing saved him, and thats after years of animal testing. My sisters mate died of lukeimea [sp] nothing saved him. So yeah it may work on some drungs. But is it really working for the vital ones after all these years?

Sorry to hear it- my grandma died of cancer too. However, my mum survived breast cancer, and my first girlfriend survived leukaemia, as did her younger brother. They're all here because of drugs tested on animals. I daresay that some of the antibiotics I was given after bacteria ate most of my middle ear were tested on animals too. Nice of you to think of us all.

Plus, so what if something works in a rabbit/monkey, dosn't necceseraly mean it would work on humans.

No....but there's an extremely good chance that it will, especially if the animals have been genetically engineered to have human-like cell characteristics.

Just like that drug that came out in the 60's for pregnant women to stop pains. Turns out all women who took that drug, there baby came out with some sort of deformaty. Makes you think dosnt it ...

Yeah, makes me think that animal testing is a good idea.

I think Deludedguy about the fact of using pedophiles, murderers etc. is a GREAT idea, seriously though... there's enough physco's/weirdo's out there for the use.

Yeah, great idea! While we're at it, why not use mentally disabled people as well, they probably won't know what's going on.

Helloooo, Dr Mengele.

[TheAnimus]

my parents keep guinea pigs, they have a loverly countained garden with a large secure wall. They don't have a run, they have the garden to frolloc in. They love it.

Guinea Pigs have very sensative skin, some of the plants can course problems, they are more sensative than humans.

Testing on guinea pigs for skin sensativity is there fore better than on humans its logical to conclude (at least for some types of products).

Would you prefer a human had to have it done? Can you put a price on a human life?
A guinea pig is £12.50 at the local pet shop, can't find many humans who cost that little round here (maybe further north?)

[shiato storm]

animals for testing cost significantly more than the ones in pet shops... they are bred for a purpose and kept 'pure', once one leaves the main breeding place thats it - they can't go back in...

[BEANFro Elite]

This is a tired subject, there are no easy ways of dealing with these sort of issues, the best one can do is just let these people get on with it whilst you ignore them...

I'm not taking any sides, but I for reasons of self improvement have stopped taking any man-made medicines, mainly because I discovered the reasons for my outrageously painful and frequent headaches and migraines were actually caused by the paracetamol / aspirin I was taking to get rid of them in the first place...kind of like that story about the lady who had a fly inside her so she ate a spider to eat the fly and so on...

Anyway, for about four years now, I have not consumed any medicines and only rarely have minor headaches, i don't get colds or flu, I wouldn't say that they should stop testing medicines on animals neither am I going to say that they should stop animal testing...

One thing that MUST stop is all this emotive twaddle about showing animals being tested on...

[TeePee]

These people you know who died from cancer despite treatment, did you ever consider that their life may have been prolonged by the treatment? Or that they were made more comfortable in their last days by pain-relieving drugs which had been tested on animals?

Would you rather your relatives and friends were tortured for the last few months of heir lives, along with millions of others, just to spare a few hundred animals?

I'll say the same thing to you as I do to the activists: When you refuse treatment and die from your treatable terminal illness, you have a right to protest.

[saucy_mish]

These people you know who died from cancer despite treatment, did you ever consider that their life may have been prolonged by the treatment? Or that they were made more comfortable in their last days by pain-relieving drugs which had been tested on animals?

Would you rather your relatives and friends were tortured for the last few months of heir lives, along with millions of others, just to spare a few hundred animals?

I suppose when you put it that way...
I mean my grandad suffered anough, and that was WITH the treatment. I didnt even reconise him when i saw him. So i could imagine what it must have been like without. I guess i really just have my reasons for and against animal testing. But mainly against. When you bring the situation to someone close though, things change ...
sorry!

[saucy_mish]

I dont think they'll need your brain , unless its to prop up a table with.

yeah yeah, dont get cocky ...

[dangel]

I'll say the same thing to you as I do to the activists: When you refuse treatment and die from your treatable terminal illness, you have a right to protest.

Just to add to that - ...and if you protest through violence to achieve your political aim then you deserve to be treated like the terrorist you are (as that's the definitition of said when i last looked).

I love animals but i'm not so narrow minded as to think we can simply stop all testing, and I don't see how driving testing to countries with LESS regulation helps spiffy the fluffy bunny wabbit.

[badass]

Saucy_mish I think your time would better be spent campaigning against lions and the torture they inflict on zebras and wildebeeste plus whatever else they hunt. How about you visit them and tell them what you think.

[Spud1]

I work (in the IT department) for a large Pharmaceutical here in Basel, and we (the company) carry out animal testing both on and off site. This involves mainly rats, but also mice, monkeys, fish, birds etc etc...

Now although I don't work directly with any of this, I live with 3 people that do, and I have been down to the labs (all underground incidentally) and seen what goes on. One thing I can say is that everyone is always very careful about what they do, and when they need to do animal tests. The process for getting a test authorised takes months, and involves a mountain of paperwork justifying why this particular experiment can only be performed on an animal, and this is reviewed both internally and externally by 3rd parties and the swiss government.

Every experiment is done in the most humane way possible, and where possibly the animals are given something to block out any possible pain caused. For when the experiments are finished, what happens next depends on the animal. The only ones I know for sure are that the rats are gassed with CO2 (quick and painless death for them, remember they only have small lungs) and the monkeys are kept alive - they don't get tested with anything dangerous enough to kill them or cause enough harm/pain. Each animal is also bred specifically for animal testing. They have never been to the wild, have no knowledge of outside their cage. They are also very expensive, costing hundreds of francs for just one rat..

We get ALOT of protestors here, often enough that you tend to see the gates half-shut at least one day a week because of nearby animal welfare groups etc, and when they show up in force they cause havoc, shouting abuse etc as we walk in to work - and I dont even work with animals or have anything to do with them, yet I still get the abuse????

I completely understand people's views on animal testing, and why they don't think it should be done, but as others have said here and as we have discussed many times at work, if it wasnt done on animals how many people would have died from diseases/illness over the past few hundred years? Many many more than there have been. Many millions of lives have been saved because of products created with animal testing, and it is my view that anyone that objects to this testing should just be disallowed any medical treatment that has any link to animal testing. Thats probably about 99.9% of drugs out there today.

The regulation and control used with animal testing today makes it a humane and safe way to test new products that could (and have done) save millions of human lives in the future. Ok so people wil say things like how come we have the right to kill an animal just for our own purposes? Well that is just how the world works. One species picks on another to survive, whether for food, shelter or whatever. A large number of people eat animals, and the majority of the meat we eat was probably treated in a worse way than the animals that get tested on. Don't fool yourself into thinking that every cow that is slaughtered feels no pain, or is killed humanely, it is simply not true - it costs too much to kill things humanely. Why should a farmer invest in a huge CO2 chamber and supplys of expensive gas when a 50quid cleaver will do the same job? (ok so I don;t actually know the exact method of slaughtering cattle but you get the idea)

ok rant over, general theme of the above is that animal testing is somethign that we wish we didnt ahve to do, but we do and it is done in a humane way while possible - and I support it. (and also that I have done no work in teh past 10 mins writing that lol, aint IT jobs great )

[Rave]

Don't fool yourself into thinking that every cow that is slaughtered feels no pain, or is killed humanely, it is simply not true - it costs too much to kill things humanely. Why should a farmer invest in a huge CO2 chamber and supplys of expensive gas when a 50quid cleaver will do the same job? (ok so I don;t actually know the exact method of slaughtering cattle but you get the idea)

Actually cattle tend to get a bolt through the brain, which pretty much is a painless and instantaneous death. However thanks to stupid EU/government rules, they're having to be transported further and further before slaughter as local abattoirs are forced out of business, which can be stressful for them.

It's pigs that people tend to be concerned about from an animal welfare point of view; not only are they more likely to be 'intensively reared', when they're slaughtered they're just given a massive electric shock across the brain to stun them before they're hung up by their hind legs and have their throat cut.

[shiato storm]

actually the 'bolt ot the brain' is rarely accurate and although true it does stun the animal it only dies when its throat is cut... so imagine if you will being unable to move, hoisted upsisde down then have your neck slit open. you're still aware, you're still alive and you slowly bleed out.

[Spud1]

thanks for the more informed backup But it helps to prove my point, animals are slaughtered for food in a much less humane way than they are with medical testing, yet way more people seem to (as far as i can tell/see) complain about animal testing than animals being eaten.. You don't see meat eaters boycotted that often..

[Rave]

actually the 'bolt ot the brain' is rarely accurate and although true it does stun the animal it only dies when its throat is cut... so imagine if you will being unable to move, hoisted upsisde down then have your neck slit open. you're still aware, you're still alive and you slowly bleed out.

No, the 'bolt' is basically a bullet that kills the cow instantly. Pigs are the ones who get hung upside down before having their throat cut.