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The Case Against Animal Experimentation

Most people are instinctively opposed to animal experiments, on moral grounds, because of the terrible suffering inflicted on laboratory animals.
Very few people, however, know about the powerful medical arguments against animal experimentation - since no species can be adequately compared with another for valid research purposes (for instance, morphine calms rats but excites cats), it is also a cause of immeasurable human suffering. All animal experiments should be immediately abolished, as a grotesque methodology for developing human medicines in that animals and people can react very differently to the same medical drug (e.g. thalidomide, opren) due to species differences. In fact, animal tests fail to predict the vast majority of human adverse drug reactions which incidentally account for as much as 5% of all hospital admissions and occur in 10-20% of hospital in-patients. All animal experimentation is followed by human trials. Participants in these clinical trials (especially hea...

Posted by: William Katz

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