Animal testing - not the ethics of it

[Penis Drager]

"Lab mice are not humans" is a statement I hope we can all agree on. It's the reason why testing a medication on mice may appear to yield promising results that are then not replicated in human trials. The physiology may be similar, but things that work in some animals don't work in others. If some medication has miraculous effects on a mouse with no side effects, it may still have no effect, or perhaps negative effects, on humans. The other way around is almost certainly true as well though.

It's obviously understandable that, if a lab rat or whatever dies from a medication, it won't move on to human trials. But that raises an important question: Is it not highly likely that some life saving drugs were never given the go-ahead for human testing on the grounds that they had detrimental effects on animals which wouldn't happen in humans?

 

[NOT Sword Fighter Super]

My sister in law used to work in a lab where they intentionally gave cancer to rabbits.
Fucked up, but people are more important.

 

[Sage In All Fields]

Yes it is but we should prioritize preventing harm over bringing good to people.

 

[Penis Drager]

Yes it is but we should prioritize preventing harm over bringing good to people.

This crossed my mind, of course. But there are some less unpalatable ways of going about it. This may violate the 8th amendment (in the US) depending on how fast and loose you want to apply it, but offering death row inmates the opportunity to test the drug (requiring that they get infected with the disease or are given cancer or some shit prior to administration) in exchange for a reduced sentence could do it.
But this was mental masturbation in any case. I don't think even the above method would fly so it's more of a "hmm..." than actual advocacy for a change in policy.

 

[Daughter of Cernunnos]

Animal testing is not as useless as you think. You're literally mindlessly reiterating radical animal rights activists talking points as an argument and expecting us to just accept your premise unquestioningly.
There are specific systems in different animals that happened to have evolved similarly to our own. Like the ferret respiratory system is similar to humans. Don't listen to animal rights activists as your only source on this. They are extremely violent and unhinged lunatics. For decades they've claimed that the tech is already there to use digital models to replace animal models. I guess medical researchers just torture animals for fun.
There is a non-profit in the US that defends the usefulness of animal testing and opposes attempts to obstruct it called Americans for Medical Progress. Yet when I Google "pro-animal testing non profit united states" I get only animal rights orgs with anti-animal testing propaganda.
The real problem with animal testing is the majority of animal rights orgs in the world are just purely 100 percent against animal testing, no matter the context. So there is no one willing to do harm reduction work to make sure animals are not being unnecessarily hurt and killed for research. They could have volunteers looking over study designs and pointing out flawed ones that are a waste of animals lives, going into to places where the testing is performed and giving USEFUL suggestions of how the conditions for the animals can be improved, instead of the typical junk of demonizing science, scientists, people who rely on modern medicine to live/cancer sufferers/"Western medicine".
They could also fund more research into animal testing alternatives instead of just trying to ban, ban, ban it all. The science is simply not there yet for animal testing to be completely replaceable by other methods. It's similar to lab grown meat. Maybe one day it will be a reality and animal welfare will be greatly improved.
Here's an example of what animal rights freaks are known to do and their antagonism for scientists. TLDR; animal rights activists in the UK dug up the body of a deceased guinea pig farmer and stole her remains. These are the people who think they have the right to lecture anyone on the ethical treatment of anything. They cannot even treat the inanimate dead with respect.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/poor-scientific-arguments-in-the-service-of-animal-rights-activism/

https://archive.md/aT2Rr

Also, we in the U.S. often forget how much more radical animal rights extremists are in the U.K., where the campaign of intimidation takes the form of death threats, intimidation of personnel of companies that supply researchers, and even in one case digging up the grave of Gladys Hammond, whose family ran a farm that raised Guinea pigs for use in medical research, and stealing her remains.

I highly recommend the post linked about for you because it answers the questions in your OP in great detail. Here's an example:

If you examine various websites or literature from animal rights extremists looking at the issue of animal use in medical research, the forms of the scientific arguments tend, when you boil them down to the very core of their essence, to take three main forms, which are related:

1. Animal research doesn’t teach us anything of value or even misleads us (i.e., it is bad science).
2. Animal research does not predict human physiology or response to disease, or animals are “just too different from humans to give reliable results” (i.e., it is bad science).
3. There are better ways of getting the information that do not use animals (i.e., there is better science available than using animals.)

I tend to look at these arguments as three faces of what is in essence the same argument, specifically what I like to call an “argument from imperfection.” In other words, because animal models have many difficulties and flaws and all too often don’t predict human physiology or drug response as well as the critics think that they should, then by implication all animal research is bad science. It is an example of demanding 100% perfection or certainty, a bar that no science can ever meet and of concrete thinking typical of extremists. (Creationists and “alternative” medicine mavens are particularly fond of this sort of argument against their hated “Darwinism” or “allopathic” or “conventional” medicine–usually said with a sneer–respectively.) In its most ridiculous form, this argument takes the form of claiming that cell culture and computer models, among other modalities, can give us the same information without animals. The first reason that this argument is ridiculous is that cell culture models tend to be even less predictive of many responses than animal models for many questions and because much physiology depends upon the interaction of different cell types in their native three dimensional matrix. The second reason is that, for a computer model to be adequately predictive, it needs (1) sufficient information to input and (2) sufficient understanding of the intricacies of the physiology and biochemistry. We don’t have either. Finally, physiology requires understanding at the macroscopic level of how organs interact. Of course, these arguments are often made in less extreme forms, and I will discuss a some of these shortly. Keep in mind as I do, though, that the problem inherent in this sort of argument is that one has to look at what the alternatives to animal research are and compare their usefulness, accuracy, and reliability. If one can’t show that one’s alternative is better than animal research, then all the complaints about the imperfections of animal research don’t amount to much. It’s still the best that we have, and, as such, it’s bad science (and unethical, to boot) not to use it before trying therapies in humans. I have yet to see a compelling argument that any alternative modality predicts human response to disease and treatment well enough that we should rely on it instead of animal models.

 

[Penis Drager]

You're literally mindlessly reiterating radical animal rights activists talking points as an argument and expecting us to just accept your premise unquestioningly.

lol wut? I know very damn well how useful animal testing is and I'm in no way advocating for it to stop. Animal testing has contributed to saving countless human lives and I'm 100% for it, hence the subtitle that implied this thread was not supposed to be about the ethics of the thing. I don't care; humans are more important than animals; fuck you.
I'm legitimately sorry if my post was easy to misconstrue. I know very well that animal testing yields similar results in humans the vast majority of the time. It was more of a question of those rare cases where the results are incongruent that I was bringing up. It's the fact that we understand very well that something working in animals doesn't necessarily equate to it working in humans, but that we don't generally think about the fact that the inverse is quite probably equally true.

 

[Emperor Julian]

Here's an example of what animal rights freaks are known to do and their antagonism for scientists. TLDR; animal rights activists in the UK dug up the body of a deceased guinea pig farmer and stole her remains. These are the people who think they have the right to lecture anyone on the ethical treatment of anything. They cannot even treat the inanimate dead with respect.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/poor-scientific-arguments-in-the-service-of-animal-rights-activism/

https://archive.md/aT2Rr

The interesting part is doing this tacitly endorses the philosophy behind animal testing as they're conceeding they believe the ends justify the means.

Personally I despise animal rights protestors for how disruptive and counter intuative it is to the more productive avenue of animal wellfare. They're just cunts.