ANIMAL LAB (new thread 2) CONTINUE HERE.
jools | 15.03.2006 11:47 | Analysis | Bio-technology | Health | Cambridge | Oxford
Lets have a little recap of some of my favourite arguments so far. Sorry to have missed out so many good anti-viv arguments but there are so many I was spoilt for choice :o). Read it and weep pro-test, if you dare. I HAVE YET TO SEE A GOOD PRO-TEST ARGUMENT!! I still wait for one.
14 March 2006
Six men are fighting for their lives suffering life-threatening multiple organ failure. The men were volunteers in clinical trials for a drug to treat conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and leukaemia. The drug had already been tested on animals although it is unclear how many of those unwilling subjects had previously been killed by the drug...
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/03/335813.html
But what if it were your child ?? This infantile form of reasoning is useless. This completly misses the point that there are other ways to find cures without using animals.
The last line of the vivisector's defence is the emotive chestnut 'either a dog/cat/mouse etc. or your child'. But not only is this argument irrelevant to the lives and daily choices of people in society today, but such an argument of 'necessary evil' has been used to justify all sorts of crimes throughout history, from Herod to Hitler. Yet this argument itself is fallacious when considering the appalling injuries and fatalities caused by animal tested drugs subsequently given to humans.
Yes, animal testing may have brought some fortuitous human benefits in the past - to argue otherwise would be as disingenuous as Professor John Stein's claim that "almost all of the medical advances of the last 100 years have happened through animal experiments" (conveniently ignoring the development of anaesthetics, the sanitation improvements which saw off infectious diseases such as TB and cholera long before vaccines were developed, the surgical techniques developed on the battlefield during the Second World War and the epidemiological studies which have identified the main - largely diet and lifestyle-related - causes of heart disease, cancer, strokes and Aids). But how do we know that the same benefits wouldn't have been achieved - and sooner - without it?
I wonder how many of the people whom pro-vivisectionists seek to manipulate emotionally with their specious "dog-or-child" dilemma are aware that, while alternatives require scientific validation before being approved, the same rigorous criteria have never been applied to animal experimentation? In fact, the Home Office has even refused to conduct a cost-benefit analysis on vivisection. Surely a reasonable request?
And "reasonable" is what the vast majority of people who want to see an end to animal testing are. They are people like me with a sense of compassion who campaign peacefully by shaking tins for humane research charities, organising sponsored walks, collecting names on petitions and talking to people on the streets. But that's not exciting enough for large sections of the media. Confrontation and violence make much better copy. Hence their relentless homing-in on a minority of extremists - which can be gratifyingly found on the fringes of any movement for social change, from women's emancipation to civil rights.
No one could be keener to see a cure for Parkinson's than I: my mother has been suffering from it for many years and it breaks my heart to see her steadily degenerate. But cutting open the skulls of monkeys - who do not even suffer from the disease - and injecting chemicals into their brains is at best a crude and highly circuitous path to achieving this. As for the ethical dimension, the distinction we seek to make between wild-caught and purpose-bred monkeys, or between pet cats and dogs and their laboratory counterparts, must be one of mankind's most monumental feats of hypocrisy.
The technology to achieve change already exists. Organisations such as the Dr Hadwen Trust and the Humane Research Trust are funding vital research into all the major human diseases to replace painful procedures on animals. Cancer research projects use complex 3D human cell cultures and mathematical modelling to improve the targeting of radiation treatments, for example, while new generations of brain scanning techniques - some of them developed at Oxford - are providing far more relevant insights into neurological diseases like Parkinson's than invasive operations on monkeys are ever likely to do.
OK, so the options were limited in Galen's day - but we are now in the 21st century, with an arsenal of sophisticated techniques at our disposal from computer simulation to stem-cell research. The British pharmaceutical company Pharmagene, for one, tests drugs exclusively on human tissue, arguing that "If you have information on human genes, what's the point of going back to animals?"
It is nonsense to suggest that abolishing vivisection would mean the end of medical progress: on the contrary, it would enable the funds lavished uncritically on projects such as the £18m Oxford laboratory to be diverted to directly relevant, human-based research, which is currently being held back by institutional inertia and vested interests.
And what better way for the university to maintain its reputation as a world-class seat of human progress and enlightenment than to be at the forefront of this endeavour?
Why don't you visisector donate sperm and eggs and use your own children for the testing ? It won't hurt you, its only a couple of cells you lose naturally - and you obviously have no humane feelings to worry about your subjects welfare.
Vivisection is scientific fraud. Thalidomide was tested on animals for ten years before being marketed to an unsuspecting public, with the terrible results of birth deformities, infanticide and some mothers becoming insane (10,000 children were born in the West with limbs missing). Again, this drug was comprehensively tested on animals before being marketed.
We must face the fact that the most careful tests of a new drug's effects on animals may tell us little of its efects on humans... animal experiments cannot obviate the risks and may even prevent the use of excellent substances.
Valium and the benzodiazepine group of sedatives are now being withdrawn because of serious side effects to mental and physical health, yet these were tested on animals and marketed as safe.
The anti diarrhoea drug Clioquinol led to thousands of deaths and 30,000 cases of blindness and paralysis in Japan alone, in 1979 a Tokyo court ruled that the drug had no therapeutic benefits whatsoever, yet this was tested on animals.
The use of vivisection in medical research can be compared to trying to cure a headache with a shotgun, maybe 1 in a 1000 times there is success.
Pro-test have a blind, stupid, Cartesian mentality, one which is totally lacking in common sense, intuition, empathy and feeling, which produces such horrific aforementioned statistics here in Britain and in many secular countries where animals are sacrificed on the altars of almighty science, the fanatical religion of the modern age, in the erroneous belief that by doing so the existential problem of human disease will one day end. It is a kind of narcissistic cerebralism totally disconnected from fellow feeling, animals, Nature and even a sense of one's own bodily incarnation. Only such a pseudo scientific mentality could work such havoc and devastation on all things earthly, and, by extension, so called 'lesser peoples' and races, as has been the tragic case in the past.
"There are no alternatives to vivisection, because any method intended to replace it should have the same qualities, but it is hard to find anything in biomedical research that is, and always was, more deceptive and misleading than vivisection. The only genuine alternative to vivisection is it's abolition" Professor P. Croce MD, former vivisector.
"95% of drugs passed by animal tests are immediately discarded as being useless or dangerous to humans (Smithkline Beecham Internal Report).
After over 100 years of cancer research on animals Cancer rates could further increase by 50% to 15 million new cases in the year 2020, according to the World Cancer Report, the most comprehensive global examination of the disease to date.
The reason why you test on animals is because you claim that 'they are not like us'. But then when you generalise the (often disastrous) results to humans, you do so because 'they are like us'. So at one point you justify your research stating that animals are like us, then you test on animals because they are not like us. Strange but true.
vivsector said...
"By the by, you can go nuke the pharmaceutical companies doing tests for eyeliners as far as I am concerned."
I would suggest that all attemps to prolomg life are mearly cosmetic. We are all going to die someday! Get over it.
When was the last time someone terrorised an innocent animal in a laboratory? Stunned it with heavy doses of toxin? Shoved a tube down its throat till it gagged and pumped the poison into its stomach? Threw it back in the steel cage with no anaesthetic? Took to it with a scalpel or a knife? Strapped it to a chair or table and rammed electrodes into its brain while the animal sobbed for mercy? Drained every last drop of blood out of its cut up and tortured body?
TODAY!!!
While you supposed pro-viv people scream and yell about the tactics being used by anti-viv people, the abuse and torture against these innocent animals is far worse and there just isnt a close comparison, or words to even describe it. Most of you people that support the building of the lab wouldnt care if you didnt feel it was your own personal safety being threatened. You care about yourselves, period. You are not truly there, speaking out in support of the lab, you are saying only that you want to assert your rights and this cause is as good as any. When the govt steps in, and workers shroud their faces, work behind walls, have private security walk them to their cars and hide the companys identity they have become the very thing they say they are being attacked by. The true meaning of a terrorist is not someone who is defending the innocent, it is of someone who wants to force their views at any cost on people who would not normally comply, in this case being animals. The defenders of the animals are not the terrorists, they did not start the fight, they are standing up for a strong belief and have been forced to take drastic action when peaceful compromise can not be reached. It says little about humanity and morals when atrocities are allowed to happen and govts support it, defend it and condemn those with conscience.
Hidden away inside laboratories and universities, millions of animals suffer and die every year. These are undertaken in the name of medical research, or carried out to test chemicals, household products, pesticides and food additives. Not only are these experiments barbaric in the 21st century, their results are unreliable and misleading, because they apply to the specific animal used not humans.
We should continue to campaign for humane non-animal research!
“The very idea that one species could serve as a model for a different species ignores the basic principles of biology” - British Medical Journal, 18th February 2002
Perhaps I should have mentioned the recent disasters of Vioxx, now being withdrawn because it has killed people (although tested on animals), and the recent poll by GP's in Britain, 84% of which said that vivisection was useless in determining the effects of drugs on their patients, or perhaps the new SSRI drugs which are now under scrutiny because they too, have been linked to serious side effects in humans, even though they were tested on animals and passed as safe. Think about it, this could be you on a hospital bed having to take all these "SAFE" drugs.
Jools.
p.s. WORLD DAY FOR LAB ANIMALS - Sat 22nd April....
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/oxford/2006/03/335723.html
Six men are fighting for their lives suffering life-threatening multiple organ failure. The men were volunteers in clinical trials for a drug to treat conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and leukaemia. The drug had already been tested on animals although it is unclear how many of those unwilling subjects had previously been killed by the drug...
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/03/335813.html But what if it were your child ?? This infantile form of reasoning is useless. This completly misses the point that there are other ways to find cures without using animals.
The last line of the vivisector's defence is the emotive chestnut 'either a dog/cat/mouse etc. or your child'. But not only is this argument irrelevant to the lives and daily choices of people in society today, but such an argument of 'necessary evil' has been used to justify all sorts of crimes throughout history, from Herod to Hitler. Yet this argument itself is fallacious when considering the appalling injuries and fatalities caused by animal tested drugs subsequently given to humans.
Yes, animal testing may have brought some fortuitous human benefits in the past - to argue otherwise would be as disingenuous as Professor John Stein's claim that "almost all of the medical advances of the last 100 years have happened through animal experiments" (conveniently ignoring the development of anaesthetics, the sanitation improvements which saw off infectious diseases such as TB and cholera long before vaccines were developed, the surgical techniques developed on the battlefield during the Second World War and the epidemiological studies which have identified the main - largely diet and lifestyle-related - causes of heart disease, cancer, strokes and Aids). But how do we know that the same benefits wouldn't have been achieved - and sooner - without it?
I wonder how many of the people whom pro-vivisectionists seek to manipulate emotionally with their specious "dog-or-child" dilemma are aware that, while alternatives require scientific validation before being approved, the same rigorous criteria have never been applied to animal experimentation? In fact, the Home Office has even refused to conduct a cost-benefit analysis on vivisection. Surely a reasonable request?
And "reasonable" is what the vast majority of people who want to see an end to animal testing are. They are people like me with a sense of compassion who campaign peacefully by shaking tins for humane research charities, organising sponsored walks, collecting names on petitions and talking to people on the streets. But that's not exciting enough for large sections of the media. Confrontation and violence make much better copy. Hence their relentless homing-in on a minority of extremists - which can be gratifyingly found on the fringes of any movement for social change, from women's emancipation to civil rights.
No one could be keener to see a cure for Parkinson's than I: my mother has been suffering from it for many years and it breaks my heart to see her steadily degenerate. But cutting open the skulls of monkeys - who do not even suffer from the disease - and injecting chemicals into their brains is at best a crude and highly circuitous path to achieving this. As for the ethical dimension, the distinction we seek to make between wild-caught and purpose-bred monkeys, or between pet cats and dogs and their laboratory counterparts, must be one of mankind's most monumental feats of hypocrisy.
The technology to achieve change already exists. Organisations such as the Dr Hadwen Trust and the Humane Research Trust are funding vital research into all the major human diseases to replace painful procedures on animals. Cancer research projects use complex 3D human cell cultures and mathematical modelling to improve the targeting of radiation treatments, for example, while new generations of brain scanning techniques - some of them developed at Oxford - are providing far more relevant insights into neurological diseases like Parkinson's than invasive operations on monkeys are ever likely to do.
OK, so the options were limited in Galen's day - but we are now in the 21st century, with an arsenal of sophisticated techniques at our disposal from computer simulation to stem-cell research. The British pharmaceutical company Pharmagene, for one, tests drugs exclusively on human tissue, arguing that "If you have information on human genes, what's the point of going back to animals?"
It is nonsense to suggest that abolishing vivisection would mean the end of medical progress: on the contrary, it would enable the funds lavished uncritically on projects such as the £18m Oxford laboratory to be diverted to directly relevant, human-based research, which is currently being held back by institutional inertia and vested interests.
And what better way for the university to maintain its reputation as a world-class seat of human progress and enlightenment than to be at the forefront of this endeavour?
Why don't you visisector donate sperm and eggs and use your own children for the testing ? It won't hurt you, its only a couple of cells you lose naturally - and you obviously have no humane feelings to worry about your subjects welfare.
Vivisection is scientific fraud. Thalidomide was tested on animals for ten years before being marketed to an unsuspecting public, with the terrible results of birth deformities, infanticide and some mothers becoming insane (10,000 children were born in the West with limbs missing). Again, this drug was comprehensively tested on animals before being marketed.
We must face the fact that the most careful tests of a new drug's effects on animals may tell us little of its efects on humans... animal experiments cannot obviate the risks and may even prevent the use of excellent substances.
Valium and the benzodiazepine group of sedatives are now being withdrawn because of serious side effects to mental and physical health, yet these were tested on animals and marketed as safe.
The anti diarrhoea drug Clioquinol led to thousands of deaths and 30,000 cases of blindness and paralysis in Japan alone, in 1979 a Tokyo court ruled that the drug had no therapeutic benefits whatsoever, yet this was tested on animals.
The use of vivisection in medical research can be compared to trying to cure a headache with a shotgun, maybe 1 in a 1000 times there is success.
Pro-test have a blind, stupid, Cartesian mentality, one which is totally lacking in common sense, intuition, empathy and feeling, which produces such horrific aforementioned statistics here in Britain and in many secular countries where animals are sacrificed on the altars of almighty science, the fanatical religion of the modern age, in the erroneous belief that by doing so the existential problem of human disease will one day end. It is a kind of narcissistic cerebralism totally disconnected from fellow feeling, animals, Nature and even a sense of one's own bodily incarnation. Only such a pseudo scientific mentality could work such havoc and devastation on all things earthly, and, by extension, so called 'lesser peoples' and races, as has been the tragic case in the past.
"There are no alternatives to vivisection, because any method intended to replace it should have the same qualities, but it is hard to find anything in biomedical research that is, and always was, more deceptive and misleading than vivisection. The only genuine alternative to vivisection is it's abolition" Professor P. Croce MD, former vivisector.
"95% of drugs passed by animal tests are immediately discarded as being useless or dangerous to humans (Smithkline Beecham Internal Report).
After over 100 years of cancer research on animals Cancer rates could further increase by 50% to 15 million new cases in the year 2020, according to the World Cancer Report, the most comprehensive global examination of the disease to date.
The reason why you test on animals is because you claim that 'they are not like us'. But then when you generalise the (often disastrous) results to humans, you do so because 'they are like us'. So at one point you justify your research stating that animals are like us, then you test on animals because they are not like us. Strange but true.
vivsector said...
"By the by, you can go nuke the pharmaceutical companies doing tests for eyeliners as far as I am concerned."
I would suggest that all attemps to prolomg life are mearly cosmetic. We are all going to die someday! Get over it.
When was the last time someone terrorised an innocent animal in a laboratory? Stunned it with heavy doses of toxin? Shoved a tube down its throat till it gagged and pumped the poison into its stomach? Threw it back in the steel cage with no anaesthetic? Took to it with a scalpel or a knife? Strapped it to a chair or table and rammed electrodes into its brain while the animal sobbed for mercy? Drained every last drop of blood out of its cut up and tortured body?
TODAY!!!
While you supposed pro-viv people scream and yell about the tactics being used by anti-viv people, the abuse and torture against these innocent animals is far worse and there just isnt a close comparison, or words to even describe it. Most of you people that support the building of the lab wouldnt care if you didnt feel it was your own personal safety being threatened. You care about yourselves, period. You are not truly there, speaking out in support of the lab, you are saying only that you want to assert your rights and this cause is as good as any. When the govt steps in, and workers shroud their faces, work behind walls, have private security walk them to their cars and hide the companys identity they have become the very thing they say they are being attacked by. The true meaning of a terrorist is not someone who is defending the innocent, it is of someone who wants to force their views at any cost on people who would not normally comply, in this case being animals. The defenders of the animals are not the terrorists, they did not start the fight, they are standing up for a strong belief and have been forced to take drastic action when peaceful compromise can not be reached. It says little about humanity and morals when atrocities are allowed to happen and govts support it, defend it and condemn those with conscience.
Hidden away inside laboratories and universities, millions of animals suffer and die every year. These are undertaken in the name of medical research, or carried out to test chemicals, household products, pesticides and food additives. Not only are these experiments barbaric in the 21st century, their results are unreliable and misleading, because they apply to the specific animal used not humans.
We should continue to campaign for humane non-animal research!
“The very idea that one species could serve as a model for a different species ignores the basic principles of biology” - British Medical Journal, 18th February 2002
Perhaps I should have mentioned the recent disasters of Vioxx, now being withdrawn because it has killed people (although tested on animals), and the recent poll by GP's in Britain, 84% of which said that vivisection was useless in determining the effects of drugs on their patients, or perhaps the new SSRI drugs which are now under scrutiny because they too, have been linked to serious side effects in humans, even though they were tested on animals and passed as safe. Think about it, this could be you on a hospital bed having to take all these "SAFE" drugs.
Jools.
p.s. WORLD DAY FOR LAB ANIMALS - Sat 22nd April....
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/oxford/2006/03/335723.html
jools