Guest Author - Susan Hopf
The bad news:
A barbaric practice whereby animals are tortured in various ways in order to:
procure toxicity levels of substances
obtain results of intentionally inflicted trauma (head, limbs, spine and other body parts)
test the consequences of activities such as space travel, deep sea diving, smoking and others
test the loss of sensory perception by intentionally blinding, severing various nerves and/or interrupting, in some fashion, different nerve pathways
study the impact of isolation, crowding, wounding, living with half a brain, living without a limb or two, starving and other morbid curiosities about human tolerances
satisfy human curiosity about a wide variety of situations that have no real significance for human advancement – such as giving LSD to elephants to induce rage behaviors
Vivisection is expensive, unreliable, unpredictable, cruel and completely unnecessary.
Why does it still occur?
Old fashioned traditions are hard to break, ego, money, lobbying, the overwhelming self-justification that humans are supreme beings and that ultimately their lives are worth more than any others on the planet.
Vivisection is still a common practice in pharmaceutical and beauty labs, universities, research hospitals of both medical and psychological study as well as many other institutes for various reasons – most are done so in the guise of advancing and protecting human kind, some profess to benefit the species on which the testing is taking place but all are out-dated and this is good news.
The good news:
Many hospitals and universities are in the process of reducing and/or eliminating animal testing. Some sensible alternatives – such as extrapolating from previous testing and then inputing those results into computer models of human anatomy and physiology are finally taking hold. The results of this particular alternative have been proven to be more accurate than translating and projecting (the consequence to human reactivity and toxicity) those results obtained from testing rats, dogs or even primates.
Other methods that can be used in place of animal testing, such as, in-vitro human epithelial tissue testing of household and beauty products and many other irritant type testing questions, give direct and faster answers than those obtained by using rabbits and other animals for same such tests. Makes sense to apply new and questionable substances on the exact tissue of concern.
The not so good news is that although testing of human products on animals is slowly, very slowly, becoming a thing of the past tests on animals for purposes such as quelling human curiosity, medical advancement, physiological and psychological study are not moving in that direction. We need to keep pressure on those institutions that feel the torture of animals is an acceptable consequence in the quest for improving human physical and mental health. This is a moral question and speaks to the enslavement and torture of those that cannot fight back against such abuses – to me it sounds far too similar to the brutality of the experiments performed on humans in the Nazi camps (all done to advance the supreme race) and we must fight, at every opportunity, such cruelty for it does nothing to enhance our society and everything to degrade the human species as a whole.
