Should animal testing be banned ?

So, why do we only want to save cute animals? If a poor old Woodlice is flipped up on its back with its little legs going like crazy do we help? No. Do 200 students rush down to the beach to throw buckets of water over exhausted mud flappers? No. Animal charities know that beauty sells and so love to put cute and majestic animals on their literature and envelopes, those imploring TV ads aimed to part us from our money, not so much save the Indian Tiger. I wonder how rural Indians feel about westerners giving money to preserve the Indian Tiger, an animal that likes eating rural Indians.

Cute v Ugly

Beauty has always been our aspiration and women spend a hell of a lot of their hard cash on cosmetics every year, the industry worth two billion alone in the UK. Most women don’t dream of a sanctuary where elephants can roam free and keep their tusks away from poachers but an anti ageing cream that actually works. Because of that vanity a lot of companies want to chase those profits by testing their creams and potions on animals so to avoid those law suits. We live in a hypocritical world where people despise hunting with hounds and so back the fox, the fox that eats the ugly chicken. The domestic cat munches through six million garden birds a year. It’s almost as is if the good looking animals are deemed intelligent and so with us. Trust me, the Dolphin is one of the nastiest sea creatures on the planet but because the Bottlenose has that permanent smile we some how feel they our mates and thinking like we do. 90% of the worlds Dolphin parks have the smiley dolphin. The ugly dolphins don’t get to go on stage and do their flips and twists, alas. It’s a bit like the X-Factor.

Carnage and greed!

In the United States approximately 28 million warm-blooded vertebrate animals are used in science experiments annually. Of that total, about 18 million animals are killed for research, compared with 2.51 million in England, 1.66 million in Canada. Around 70 million animals globally are believed to be experimented on each year. There are tight rules on how cruel the labs can be but once they are licensed, like rest homes for senile folks, they tend not to be inspected much after as we just don’t want to know what’s really going on in there, out of sight, out of mind.


I would certainly agree that there are one too many companies testing on animals in pursuit of profits, often for cosmetic products and other reasons other than medical ones, not a good situation. Putting shampoo in cute bunny’s eyes suggests nothing ethical about this trade. But when it comes to our health and testing I am firmly with the homosapiens and not animal libbers. I challenge any animal lover who detests vivisection to carry a card that says I don’t want any drugs administered to my person that came about by animal testing. When you’re trapped in a mangled car wreck and in pain or dyeing of a curable illness you aren’t going to argue with what makes you better. That’s the only reason we medical test on animals. It would be lovely if we only needed to test on ugly animals but we need to test on animals that are the closest to our DNA and so look like us and so apes are unfortunately rattling those cages.

Human testing...

A more harrowing side to this is when humans are used instead of animals, plenty of documented cases of western drug companies going down to the third world and infecting innocent people in the community with the company’s products and without their permission. It was recently revealed that in the 1950s the United States government infected up to 700 innocent people in Guatemala with gonorrhoea and syphilis so to study the effects it would have on soldiers in wartime. They were infected by prostitutes paid for by the US government. Big unnamed pharmaceutical have even been known to go down to Africa and test ‘potential’ vaccines on the locals, putting a white coat on and sticking a needle in them and not telling them why, as explored in the film The Constant Gardener. This stuff was and may still be happening for real and would happen more if there was blanket ban on animal testing. These things have to be tested and so its much better its animals and regulated by governments.

Life saver..

When Fabrice Muamba went down at the Spurs match most thought he was dead. But he didn’t and kept alive today by fibulation techniques tested on monkeys. Without apes there would be no real method to judge the correct volts to blast through the human body or how safe pacemakers are. Fabrice has a small device in his chest that shocks the heart back to life for when his next arrhythmia strikes; as the many monkeys were it was tested on. This was a healthy heart that lost its rhythm. It can happen to anyone, even animal libbers, and approximately 2000 people a year in the UK suffering this type of sudden death. To protect the human race we have to do what’s best for it and we do rule the animal kingdom so I’m afraid there no wavers for the lab rats.

Terror!

Where this does get silly is the way activist target people and companies connected with the industry, often viciously so, these unfortunate people often tenuously linked, effectively terrorizing them. If your company did a paint job at Huntingdon Sciences you could find a bomb under your car, which suggest these people value animal life more than humans, somewhat ironic. But when you dig deeply these libbers are often outsiders and signed up to many other causes, anti authority and anarchists, giving love to fury cute animals they have never received and long for from humans, the love and acceptance we all seek.