Not horsey, but what are your views on animal testing?

Jesstickle, i work for AstraZeneca (with the animals), so can i win with you too? :D

Ps, i believe everyone should have a day out to a research facility. You'd all be pleasantly surprised. :)
 
itsonlyme said:
Jesstickle, i work for AstraZeneca (with the animals), so can i win with you too? :D

Ps, i believe everyone should have a day out to a research facility. You'd all be pleasantly surprised. :)
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agreed, the one I've been at actually used to have a policy of inviting people protesting outside in to have a look at what really goes on and educate themselves!
 
We always have students in (from year 10, up to uni vet students). If there was anything to hide or anything that could distress a 14/15 year old, we wouldn't let them in.
 
What people who are appalled by animal testing often don't realise (and I guess it is somewhat ironic) is that often you find it is people who love animals who end up working in research facilities. In my opinion, that is a very good thing, as care is then implicit.

If you train in the field of biological sciences, animal technician jobs are one of the largest avenues of work available on qualification, or if moving into post-grad research, then you end up in roles that call for experimental animals to be used. So people such as myself (who love animals) end up working with exp. animals, being responsible for the way they are used and their care. Although I no longer work in this field (have moved on to humans!) all I can say is I always treated my beasts with the utmost compassion, respect and care. There was never anything to hide and we regularly had ethics committees wander around our facilities.
 
I believe that in medical research it is a necessary tool in furthering our ability to cure and treat and that whilst it is not a nice thought I'm sure selfishly we would all prefer our children or relatives were not the ones to suffer due to a lack of live testing. I also believe very strongly that it is far better this testing happens in the UK as the rules and regulations are very strict and there is good legislation in place (I know this as my instructor worked in the labs for many years) and if anything people ought to be campaigning for labs to be banned overseas and more medical testing to be carried out here. However I am completely against it for cosmetic purposes, I think it is cruel and unnecessary!
 
Absolutely pootleperkin. I have a degree in animal behaviour & welfare, as do most of the other younger recruits. The older ones (been there 25+ years) don't, but most have pets at home & are big softies with the lab animals :)
 
Totally against it for cosmetics and household products, including bath soaps and shampoos and deodorants. I will not buy any products from companies that test on animals, i.e. unilever, proctor and gamble and johnson and johnson. I am also against animal testing for human medicine, what about testing it on volunteers who get paid for it ? The volunteers would make an informed choice and naturally, the pay would be very good. Otherwise testing on convicted criminals makes sense too. Animal testing for animal medicines on the other hand makes sense as long as any painful procedures are done under anaesthetic and the test subject receives all necessary pain medication afterwards.


I have probabably taken medication that has been tested on animals, but I always ask my pharmacist whether there is any current testing taking place with that product and if they don't know I will research it until I know before I decide to take the medication, often I won't as usually the ailment will resolve itself in time without medication.

I believe all consumers have the right to choose and all products that are tested on animals should be labelled as such, just as those that are not should be as well. If the ingredients are tested on animals and not the product then that should also appear on the label.
 
Niraf sweetie, don't worry about whether you've taken medicine that's tested on animals because all the products you buy from "ethical" companies that are not that nasty unilever / proctor & gamble / johnson & johnson have ingredients that were tested to be safe for you to use on animals. The nice ethical companies don't do the testing themselves but they won't risk using something that hasn't been well and truly tested already.
 
Niraf said:
I have probabably taken medication that has been tested on animals,
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You have. If you have taken any medication, you have taken something tested on animals. If it happened in the dim and distant past or if it happened now what difference does it make?

If you get something serious, cancer for example, would you turn down treatment?

What if your mum/brother/child got sick would you rather they didn't have treatment?

I am absolutely 100% against safety testing in humans. Even if they do volunteer and are paid. I think it would be incredibly difficult to explain to people the genuine risks and I think you'd find that only a very vulnerable section of society would ever apply, through necessity, and that, to me, smacks of exploitation.
 
Niraf said:
I am also against animal testing for human medicine, what about testing it on volunteers who get paid for it ? The volunteers would make an informed choice and naturally, the pay would be very good. Otherwise testing on convicted criminals makes sense too.
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Nifraf, you obviously have a strong ethical code.....however it is precisely our human ethical code, which makes us value other human being more than other creatures (I'm not saying that is right or wrong, it just is), and so would never allow early stage testing of new drugs on humans, no matter how much they were paid. I mean think about it - paying someone an awful lot of money to to be tested on is completely unethical and coersive - who do you think is going to come forward? The rich and famous (I don't think so), or people living on the poverty line with families to feed? The ethical implications are unimaginable as you are essentially targeting a vulnerable section of the population.

I'm sure you are aware that when testing a new drug, you have to go through a tiered level of testing, or stages. The first few will invariably have to use animals. Even after that, this sort of thing can still happen, the infamous head swelling incident:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-381585/Human-guinea-pig-speaks-drug-test-horror.html

I see you are not from the UK, but this one incident was in the press for weeks and there was huge public outcry. No matter how much you love animals, there is no way that public opinion would allow cases such as the above to keep happening. After this incident, the approval for drug studies in Europe on human subjects was tightened up to a crazy degree, for example, if you wanted to test a drug, which was already approved for a certain use and safe for human consumption, for another purpose, you have to go through the whole clinical trial scenario once again. Crazy, but it reflects why naive thoughts of paid volunteers or using criminals for studies just ain't going to (ethically) happen.

Oh yeah, and Dee is correct - eveything you use has more than likely been tested on an animal historically.

As for vet drug testing - again I agree with you - this seems more correct. However, you do realise that drugs can't always be tested under anaesthetic and with pain meds given afterwards? As with the human head swelling case above, often drugs are adminstered and you don't really have any idea what is going to happen - you just suck it and see......not good, but a fact of life if you want to save other human or animal lives :(
 
pootleperkin said:
Jesstickle - looks like we are coming from the same place again! :) Exploitation was the word I was looking for!
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I think once you understand the nitty-gritty of it most people reach the same conclusions :)

I always used to joke about HLS that they were much nicer to the animals than they were to their staff!
 
Much as I would be happy to use paedophiles, as imo they have far less claim to life than animals, the idea of paying human volunteers instead would really worry me. As already said, it would be those desperate who volunteered. Not just money wise, but I think you'd also get parents of terminally ill children volunteering to test any possible cure through desperation. Which would be truly sickening.
 
I think it is needed, remember they test on people too after the animal tests, and people can have very different reactions to animals.

We wouldnt have half the treatments we have today without it and its helped to save many human and animal lives over the years. Hopefully we can find out more to help in the future with treatments too
 
My idea:

All prisoners that are on 'Death Row' or have life sentences, Test it all on them. They gave up their human rights with the act they did to get there so bugger them.

And lets face it if it kills them who really cares?
 
chrisritch said:
My idea:

All prisoners that are on 'Death Row' or have life sentences, Test it all on them. They gave up their human rights with the act they did to get there so bugger them.

And lets face it if it kills them who really cares?
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I care for starters

amymay said:
Outdated and outmoded.
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And sadly not. There is no viable alternative for safety testing new drugs. Things like repro tox especially can not be effectively accounted for in vitro or even ex vivo and it is hard to do any kind of DMPK without using animals.
 
jesstickle said:
And sadly not. There is no viable alternative for safety testing new drugs. Things like repro tox especially can not be effectively accounted for in vitro or even ex vivo and it is hard to do any kind of DMPK without using animals.
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I have no idea what of that means, sorry.

But I simply can't believe that we need to continue experimenting on animals. Computer modelling should be able to do it all for us now.
 
amymay said:
I have no idea what of that means, sorry.

But I simply can't believe that we need to continue experimenting on animals. Computer modelling should be able to do it all for us now.
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Some of the advances made have been phenomenal, and I sincerely hope that animal testing can be reduced or done away with as a result. So does everyone involved, check out the three Rs.

Some things can not be modelled though. Repro tox is reproductive toxicity. i.e. does the compound affect the treated animal's offspring. Think thalidomide and you're in the right ball park. Seemed totally safe and it was for the patient, but was terrible for the babies :eek:
This is a slightly flawed example as it checked out safe in trials but it is just one thing I can think of, off the top of my head, that is a compound of this ilk. Animal trials are by no means perfect either.


DMPK is drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics. i.e. where does the compound end up and in what form once the body has broken it down. Some compounds are apparently benign but the things they get turned into are not.

Sadly a living organism is so complex that there are some things which we just can not, as yet, model. These two things are good examples of those. Modelling and animal testing both have their faults. I think at the moment we probably still need both to give ourselves the best chance of getting it right.

Hope that explains, at least a bit, what I was banging on about! :o
 
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Well put Jess.

Amymay - I really do wish were were intelligent enough to make computer models that could mimic the complexity of the human body. If that were the case, pretty much every disease that causes us harm would be cured by now - we could just model the disease and have an answer to everything. Modelling isn't infallible - not to get into it too much, but even models rely on 'real' information to be fed into them in the first place, then at the end, in order to be ethical, their results still need to be tested.

Jess talked about the 3Rs, which are pretty much the mantra of UK animal research - reduction, refinement and replacement. All animal studies address these three factors: can the number of animals used be reduced to the minimum to reach a valid conclusion, can the experiements be refined to get the answer more efficiently with as little suffering as possible and can the animal model be replaced - yes, by computer modelling, or any other means.

It is biological complexity that means at this present moment, after strict examination of the experimental licences that have been applied for up and down the country, it has been found that we have no other means to address the question being asked. Some people might not always like or agree with the questions asked, but that is another debate.
 
Guess I should join the (serious) geek club too!

I'm supposed to be writing a paper, but seem to be writing far more on here for some reason......ooh goody, Wimbledon's on now :) That's my working Friday finished then ;)
 
When 'testing' is mentioned people tend to think of live animals having nasty things injected into them or dropped in their eyes. However, a lot of experiments and tests in medical research are done using cells harvested from tissue, or sometimes whole organs, from animals after they have been pts. This isn't vivisection, because the animals are already dead when they are used.

Are those who are against 'animal testing' also opposed to this? As far as the animal is concerned, it is not much different than being killed to be eaten as food, and in many cases they will have a gentler, more peaceful death than would occur in an abbatoir because an overdose of anaesthetic is used to kill the animal.

I am opposed to using animals, either dead or alive, for unnecessary testing and experimentation. In my opinion, cosmetic safety testing is unnecessary since we have enough cosmetics already. Where animal testing can be justified, as in developing new drugs and treatments for human and animal diseases and disorders, considerable effort is made, through the licencing procedures, to minimize their use and to ensure the animals suffer as little as possible in life and death. We are a long way from being able to replace all or even most experiments with computer modelling because biological systems are so complex and our understanding of them far from complete.
 
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