[shadowrunner]

These experiments are cruel. Who has the right to experiment on these animals? Who gave these "scientists" permission to inflict suffering on these mice? Accountability and compassion are lacking here.

When will we as a race start challenging the morality of animal experimentation and vivisection? There needs to be protections afforded to animals. This cruelty needs to stop.

[benesch]

Turn the question on its head. Why is it right to prolong human and animal suffering to minimize the suffering of a few lab animals?

These experiments are incredibly important for science and healthcare.

[shadowrunner]

Am I to believe you? Even if these experiments do have importance, are they more important than being humane and ethical?

We're so damn advanced as a race, yet we can't come up with more humane alternatives?

We have record unemployment and pharmaceutical companies that are making billions in profits, why can't we experiment on humans who give consent and are fairly compensated? It's more humane to animals and people.

[unimpressive]

Because these experiments kill stuff.

The humans are more valuable, and I'm sorry that you'd rather see them die than a few rodents.

[shadowrunner]

And I'm sorry you lack insight and empathy towards both animals and people who could use the income to have a better life.

[GHFigs]

The problem is you (as a scientist) don't know that an experimental subject will have a better life, or a life at all, and you don't have enough data about the risks to fairly compensate a person for taking those risks on. You're just making the cost of collecting data much more expensive while shifting the risk (of suffering, disability, death) from animals bred for the purpose to poor people.

[anoncow]

While the topic was about animal suffering, you are talking about suffering in human subjects. As far as I know(and that is not much), human studies are done after animal studies. This means the drug is most likely not toxic to animals and by extension humans.

[reasonattlm]

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/04/animal-studies-in...

"Animal experimentation is horrible and terrible. Even in the most ethical of studies suffering is inflicted upon animals that otherwise would not have happened; entire genotypes of animals doomed to additional suffering have been bred in some cases. But the alternative is far worse: to not perform these animal studies, or rather for some privileged group to use force to prevent others from performing such studies, and so bring progress in medicine to a grinding halt. Without animal studies there would be no new meaningful advances in medical science. It is a harsh and unpleasant aspect of the human condition that forcing suffering upon animals in the course of scientific studies is necessary to advance both human and veterinary medicine. A few suffer for the benefit of many - an equation that should make any sane and compassionate person uncomfortable.

"Animal studies are even required to refine the science needed to move beyond animal studies. Ethics and morality aside, studies employing animals are expensive and time-consuming. Given the choice, scientists would much rather experiment on cells in a dish, or on slabs of unfeeling cultured tissue, or upon simulations of animals, if these methods would generate results of the same quality.

"In comparison to what might be and what is possible, we live in a barbaric age of suffering, war, death, and sundry other horrors that we like to keep behind the curtains and out of the mind's eye. But barbaric as it is, this age is far better than the past by all such measures. We no longer absolutely, definitely need to slaughter animals for food to sustain the populace, for example, and rates of violence between humans are far lower than in the pre-modern era of tribes and universal poverty. The option stands open today for a society of vegetarians: it is practical from a technological and economic standpoint. That we have not moved rapidly in that direction is our shame, and our descendants will look back on us as savages for this and many other reasons.

"Those people who criticize and take action against the use of animals in medical research should first look to their diets, and then to the practice of farming animals. Vast and expansive animal suffering is caused in the name of putting meat into the marketplace - greater many times over each month than in all the animal experiments in modern history. Persuade the omnivores of the human race to relinquish their participation in the meat market before savaging the medical science that will benefit both man and beast.

"In short, the human condition is a rotted, cloying swamp, but we're closer to the edge than we were - no longer up to our necks in it, we now have the luxury of finding more of our surroundings to be disgusting and primitive. The way out to solid ground is forward, through more of the same, until our biotechnology becomes good enough to do away with the suffering we must inflict upon animals in order to build better medicine. Perhaps along the way, societies will arise whose members also reject the needless suffering we presently choose to inflict upon animals in order to eat the same diet as our ancestors."

[quasque]

The animals were bred specifically for such experiments. For example, the mice in these experiments were blind, immunosuppressed mice that would not survive in the wild anyway. Such research is not done with cruelty in mind; the animals are taken care of as well as possible despite their eventual fate - even their deaths are performed quickly and painlessly. In laboratory jargon, they are termed "sacrifices" which I think very positively describes their role - their lives being taken for the greater good of knowledge, enlightenment, and the overall reduction of suffering.

[pixl97]

If they don't stop torturing these poor animals, we're going to hunt them down and lock them in cages!

That's the problem with reality, might really does make right.