To believe that people who are against animal testing of pharmaceuticals should refuse any medicines or medical procedures tested on animals?

[Garcia10]

I've just read a post on another thread that has made me think about this issue.

It is law that all pharmaceutical products and most medical procedures are tested on animals before they are tested in humans. This is the requirement of both the FDA and the CTA. Basically animal testing has to occur or no new drugs can come to the market. The vast majority of drugs have been, and until a legalisation change, will be tested on animals.

There are predictive/computational methods available but they are not reliable enough for the regulatory authorities to allow the data to be used in place of data obtained from animals.

Many people seem to take a moral standpoint that animal testing is wrong, that they are against it and they judge others who are involved in the practice. All scientists would prefer there to be another method of treating new drugs but at present there isn't an alternative which would allow a drug to make it to the market.

My argument is that everyone is entitled to their own opinion but it seems a hypocrisy to me that there are individuals who condemn scientists who perform animal testing whilst at the same time taking the benefit of what the tests produce.

So tell me, anyone who would condemn scientific research on animals if your children were diagnosed with cancer would you refuse the chemotherapy? If you have fertility issues would you refuse IVF? If you are depressed would you not take anti-depressants? All these drugs have been tested on animals.

Did you have an argument with someone? Do you work in a drug company?

Personally I wouldn't agree with condemning an individual researcher for testing animals (unless the testing was particularly barbaric and/or unnecessary). I think arguing with them on the issue of animal testing if the opportunity arose might be ok, to try to get across ones point of view. But it is more important to criticise the way the system works as a whole (and there are so many things wrong with how this industry works it would be hard to know where to start).

I haven't been involved in campaigning on this issue myself, bye the way, just interested in it when the topic crops up.

Surely the best thing they could do would be to volunteer to test drugs at the stage where animal testing would come in, and take the risk that things are a bit dodgy at that stage. If there were enough people willing to do that then maybe they could lose animal testing.

Refusing to use the medication after it's been done is a bit futile. A bit like my bil has a sporran inherited through his family that has real fur on. He sometimes thinks he should throw it away but that'll really help the animal that died over 100 years ago won't it.

These are the kind of arguments that really irritate me.

This one is a prime example:

So tell me, anyone who would condemn scientific research on animals if your children were diagnosed with cancer would you refuse the chemotherapy? If you have fertility issues would you refuse IVF? If you are depressed would you not take anti-depressants? All these drugs have been tested on animals.

Frankly, it's an IDIOTIC question. I'd put it in the same category as people who used to ask "Muuuuhhhhh if you're a vegetarian but you had to eat meat or someone would kill your parents would you do it".

Of course the vast vast majority of people wouldn't refuse the treatment, because it is the ONLY option they have. What people (generally) want, is to have non animal tested options available, and for companies to be working towards an end to animal testing.

You'd have to be exceptionally close minded to consider someone who bends their principles to save the lives of their immediate family members is a "hypocrite".

Putting necessary medical treatment in the same vein as fucking lipstick is ridiculous.

I'd personally very strongly support EU legislation which gave an end date for animal testing on all cleaning products and their ingredients, gave funding for alternative testing methods on medical products, and made it illegal to sell cosmetic products which were, or contained ingrediants tested on animals anywhere in the world, at any point of sale.

This would get rid of the current loophole where companies pretend they just LOVE the animals and"oh look how much work we do to end animal testing", but still want to rake in the profits from China so happily allow all their products to be animal tested in order to sell there. Now THAT is hypocrisy.

There are also issues of logistics in animal testing
eg: the first time someone does an experiment it may be actually adding to the sum of knowledge but then because pharma is run by large companies with highly protected IP, and there is no single central database, the results do not get shared transparently and so the test ends up getting repeated loads of times when the results are already 'known' somewhere.

It is possible to accept some testing at the present time for medicines but still want to get rid of these types of problems which produce unecessary tests, and/or to want to improve the quality of life of the animals used in any tests which still remain.

My point was don't judge and condemn scientists for doing the best they can within the legislation they have to work within.

That's quite different from what you actually said and of course it's possible to protest against animal testing without condemning the individuals who actually work within a framework in which it is deemed necessary. I don't think most people would dream of blaming those who do those jobs, but trying to change the system in which they work whilst still benefiting from the work done in the past doesn't make them hypocrites.

It's not as black and white as either test or don't test on animals. Some testing is necessary to ensure a drug is safe, but not all testing is.

I don't know if it is still the case but it was that a drug that has been used safely in the UK for years could not go on the market in the USA before the USA performed animal testing. I don't think that is right, if a drug has been tested in humans and found to be safe and the data is from a reliable source then why retest?

LD 50 - no reason for this really, although I believe it can now be estimated from human cell culture which is probably more accurate. I'm still not convinced how useful it is in real life.

Without lab animals most scientific discoveries wouldn't be made.

That's nonsense. Animal testing is a very unreliable measure of how drugs will affect humans, and it's one of the latest stages a drug goes through before it's approved. It's not a significant part of the drug development and it tells us virtually nothing about what affect the drug will have on a person.

It's a necessary part of the research process, and it will be for a good while yet. Mice for example are an incredibly good model.

I worked for several years in a cancer lab and we used mice and cell cultures as our model systems. Are in Vivo models an absolutely perfect 1:1 replica of a human system? No. Are they vastly better than anything else we currently have? Yup. Can you do the same work with cells? No.

To do animal research in this country you need a licence from the home office - you need training and you get a licence based on the severity of your research. I worked on developmental cancers and bowel/gastrointestinal / breast cancers. I used mice with various genes knocked out to explore the effects of certain genes on certain tumours.

For example .... You get certain mouse lines that are (naturally ) very prone to bowel cancers. It's the same gene that causes a really horrible syndrome in humans which results in hundreds of tumours through the gut and an early and painful death. You can knock genes out in those mice and see if it makes things better/worse. If blocking a gene reduces/eliminates that cancer burden, all you need to do is make a drug that blocks the action of that gene and you have a potential therapy...

So, the licence I had let me do that. There was no torturing of animals involved. They had to be kept in extremely clean conditions (your average pet shop would be busted by the home office for poor keeping) and I only had a moderate licence, so I had to check my mice twice daily - I was not allowed to let them suffer. If I saw a mouse looked a bit peaky I had to euthanise it. There was none of the awful stuff you see in anti cosmetics pamphlets. I would have been happy to show any of you how we kept and used our mice.

Other examples I've used - antibodies made in bunnies. Bunny is injected a limited number of times with a protein, x months later you take a blood sample and isolate the antibodies. You can only do it a few times and then they get retired (there's an awful lot of retired rabbits in back gardens across the country) or put down.

There's a lot of anti research propaganda out there, but all the research scientists I know take very good care of their (very valuable) animals, which can take years and millions of pounds to produce. I think people hear the words 'animal testing' and have a gut reaction based on awful images like the draize test in rabbits (thankfully banned now) they don't understand what goes on in a lab.

Right now, they are the best model we have and so many breakthroughs would not have happened if we had no animal models. The work I did is now in the early stages of the drug development process.

If people want to advocate for animal welfare, I suggest they take on industrial farming and the shocking cruelty seen in some domestic settings.

Nowadays I work further down the pipeline and test all my drugs on humans :)

Tusker, that's not entirely true.

You do your basic research (in vitro stuff) then you move to cells and then animals. That's still an early stage in the process. It's the preclinical stage and some of that is conducted in animals. Once you have a drug candidate you can then move onto human trials - phase one first, where you expose a healthy human to the drug and increase the dosage, noting effects, pharmacokinetics etc. then you move on to phases two and then three (the widespread trials in humans) after that you can get approval and even then you still watch the drug for years and report any side effects. And sometimes you find effects years after approval (think of the whole vioxx thing a few years back.)

Animals can be an excellent model, you just have to be aware of the similarities and differences (penicillin kills guinea pigs for example,Mao they're not great to use...) when I used mice, we had models with specific genes knocked out that mimicked cancer syndromes exactly. When you make a new mouse model part of the process is phenotyping, where you characterise the model. If it's a poor model, it's not used.

If you ask any scientist who uses animals, they'll tell you they have a healthy respect for them. One day I think we will have sufficient computing power to test things in a virtual human, but until then we have animals. What important is to have very tight rules on research standards, and animal conditions. We do have that in the UK - we have some of the highest standards in the world.

OP, many many many animals do die in labs?

[[http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/18/animal-lives-wasted-in-drugs-safety-tests this article "Scientists told to stop wasting animal lives.
Bad experiments for stroke and cancer drugs produce poor results, say research chiefs"]]

If people want to advocate for animal welfare, I suggest they take on industrial farming and the shocking cruelty seen in some domestic settings.

This^^

silver many, many more die in industrial settings. The state some people keep their pets in is a disgrace. Pest control will kill more mice than scientists.

When i was at Uni my department used animals in research and i was very impressed by the levels of responsibility and care taken by the scientists involved. Whilst it would be great to reduce the overall number of animals used I'd like to see more of it done in the UK purely because we have such rigorous laws around it.

Are people who protest but use medication hypocrites? I suppose technically yes. Fiercely objecting to something right up until the point at which you yourself need it is a form of hypocrisy but it would seem so futile to do otherwise.

from the article:19 April 2015 The Observer
'Scientists told to stop wasting animal lives'

Mark Prescott, head of research policy for the UK National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research, said the guidelines represented a change for the scientific community. “Yes, you can use animals in experiments, but no more than necessary – and no fewer. It is ethically questionable to get the numbers wrong either way.”

Wendy Jarrett, chief executive of Understanding Animal Research, said: “The scientific community needs to use the latest data in order to make sure studies are appropriately powered. In some cases, this means fewer animals can be used, but sometimes it will lead to more being used in order to ensure we get meaningful results.”

This point was stressed by Penny Hawkins of the RSPCA. “It is good that this problem has been put right but bad that it took so long to do so. Animals have suffered unnecessarily and patients have been let down because public money has been wasted on worthless research. We now need to see how robustly the agencies follow up these new guidelines and ensure scientists comply with them.”

I do see your point but as others have said, there's no choice at present, but I do think it's important to keep the issue alive.

What annoys me more is that with regard to toiletries etc, there is a choice but still most people simply don't care if their shampoo has been tested, or contains ingredients that have been tested on animals. Otherwise why are the shelves of supermarkets and chemists still predominantly crammed with stuff that isn't, for example, BUAV approved? Look on the S&B threads, masses of products recommended that aren't cruelty free. But for the life of me I can't think of a single good reason why my shampoo should be tested on an animal, and as there is a choice, albeit a rather limited one, why buy that stuff?

My opinion is that they are hypocrites. I don't "like" animal testing but I do see it as necessary at the moment. Not for cosmetics but for pharmaceuticals. I choose to accept the treatments that have been tested on animals and therefore I cannot oppose it.

Just use the scientists' families or clone lots of their offspring for the purpose. Stop trying to guilt trip everyone.

It is a spurious ethical stance because we are where we are. People against animal testing are looking for change, as are some scientists who are questioning the scientific validity of some of this precious testing.

This testing has elements of orthodoxy about it 'thou shalt not question testing unless you are too stupid to understand it'. Problem is there are many very clever people who are against needless suffering of sentient beings for research of dubious value. Don't just shout 'thicko' address the scientific community's own concerns.

Animals do suffer in these labs, and if the bar for use of them was set extremely high and the results were unpolluted by faulty models, then more people might be convinced. But I am very suspicious now of the motives of big pharma.

river - I genuinely believe it's because:

a) People just assume that most things aren't tested on animals any more
b) the BUAV mark is really not well advertised in stores (example: it's impossible to use as a search criteria in places like boots)
c) It's very difficult to actually find, considering large stores do a frankly PATHETIC job of stocking BUAV brands
d) It's actually a lot more complicated than it looks. Burt's bees is technically cruelty free (unless you're vegan), but is owned by parent company Clorox, which is not animal friendly.

Look at the Body Shop - they made a huge song and dance about being animal friendly, and then sold out to L'Oreal who are in no way animal friendly.

To find brands which are genuinely animal friendly and not owned by a soulless animal testing parent company is really hard. Especially if you don't live in the UK, or don't have £15 to spend on a cruelty free moisteriser.

Places like Boots and Sainsbury's - not to mention Sephora - should be utterly ashamed of themselves for the lack of cruelty free products they stock.

Superdrug have loads of cruelty free products, I think all their own grand products are cruelty free. Vegans love Superdrug.

Since my vegan son made me watch the film 'Earthlings' about how sentient creatures are treated in all animal industries I have increasingly felt that we use living things as a resource in an unacceptable way. Science is full of orthodoxies and irrational positions, it's just a white coat gives you credibility. But there were white coats in Nazi Germany and I guess they thought they were doing proper science.

Now some of this animal testing may be fine and unnecessary suffering avoided but some is clearly poor science and gratuitous suffering. There should be a much much higher bar and the need to justify research in terms of real results and also industries that use animals should be transparent about it or be made to be transparent about it. Because if it touched their precious profits then they would find a way to reduce the testing to what was actually solid science and good results.

The real culprit is the law in the way it shores up testing and fails to protect sentient creatures from harm, at all. You can be arrested for cruelty to dogs and cats but not if they're in a lab.

I agree with stopping cosmetics testing on animals. I don't like the thought of testing medicines on animals but understand it is a necessity.

It's very much a grey area.

I just think the demand isn't there. I know of only one other person who actively searches out cruelty free products (we are both big fans of Superdrug!). Everyone else just buys what they consider the best product regardless. Boots is appalling, but even supermarkets like Sainsbo's, whose own brand stuff is now BUAV approved, stock hardly anything else that is. I think the Phil Smith hair stuff us the only other cruelty free stuff they stock.

Well medical progress has come with this price tag and we are all thankful for its achievements.

Still, I am uncomfortable with animal testing and having been in a biomed lab and seen how complacent some biomed researchers can be towards the small furries that are the usual testing strains I think we should keep pushing for better alternatives.

Am I a hypocrite for using the end products - well, it's a kind of catch-22 isn't it? We should continue to push for better alternatives, but if we don't in the meantime use the medicines that are currently available on principle of how they were developed the entire program of development, including better alternatives, will grind to a halt. All those bunny deaths were for nothing.

I'm a bit more dumbstruck at the hypocrisy of using all the advances of animal-based research yet mollycoddling a family pet - people want a new drug over the counter, but they wouldn't put forward their family dog or the children's bunny to test it on first!

Now some of this animal testing may be fine and unnecessary suffering avoided but some is clearly poor science and gratuitous suffering. There should be a much much higher bar and the need to justify research in terms of real results and also industries that use animals should be transparent about it or be made to be transparent about it.

Where would you set the bar? It's incredibly difficult because the nature of original research is that the answers are not known. How do you feel about Universities carrying out this research (ie not a pharmaceutical company)?

Whilst transparency may also sound appealing it sometimes just isn't safe. A few years ago employees of a company which provided secretarial staff for another company which used animal testing were targeted by terrorists.

The hypocrisy is awesome, but it runs very deep culturally. We want something so we justify it

I want; therefore it is right, rather than - I will want what is right.

The irrationality of our attachment to our pets v our disdain for animals used in testing makes us look ridiculous. Watch the film Earthlings as it shows us what we don't want to accept, i.e. that these beings are absolutely suffering and we all know it, we're just too spineless to do the right thing and push for change. Change is never easy but it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to change things which are wrong.

Science is really starting to show us how sentient these animals are for example rats can register each other's facial distress. And they are capable or apparent altruism, something they have traditionally been thought to be incapable of.

here
Rat saves drowning fellow rat instead of taking chocolate

Nicky in response there is quite a lot online suggesting alternatives to animal testing [[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1319016413001096 here] suggesting the three Rs. Reduce, Refine, Replace.

For example where stress hormones caused by poor cage environment actually leads to compromised results then refinement of environment gives better science and less cruelty.

Reduce the sheer volume of animals used is something many scientist would advocate through adjusting the expectations.

Replace with lower order animals, or eventually with lab generated cell life.

I wouldn't care that much if it were a university or a company, but I imagine that the uni and the private company would both be tolerant of animal suffering because the system is built on it.