Animal Liberation(6)

To me it's very obvious that those who turn a blind eye to such experiments
consider animals more as statistics than sentient beings capable of feeling
pain. Of course in this view, there is nothing to warrant consideration.
In the first part of these series of posts I concluded that we cannot discriminate
against animals based on the reason that we are different or superior to them,
and that it’s wrong to think that it entitles us to exploit them. But the fact is
that such experiments are commonly being done every day and vivisection is
a very normal routine. Students very soon are forced to fight their initial feelings
for animals and consider those feelings as mere sentiment. The opponent to
this argument may ask: Are we prepared to lose lots of lives if they could be
saved by experimenting on animals? and : Can we give up the future of medicine
in finding more cures for many other killing diseases? In answer to these questions
I pose another question: Why don’t we do the experiments on human volunteers?
Evidently we cannot find as many subjects as we could before, but we can make
up for part of this loss by designing more precise experiments and performing them
in a more efficient way. After all, experimenting on animals still leaves the scientists
in need of doing them on humans for the final result, so why not doing them on
humans from the start? The fact that a certain chemical can even have different
effects on different humans, tells us how much we can rely on the results of the
experiments on animals. I think many of these experiments are dispensable and
can be done without them.
(posted by Farid)





Posted:Friday, May 23, 2003 |