It is completely untrue that animal experiments have never saved a single human life. Oppose them on the grounds of cruelty by all means, but the "animal experiments are all a waste of time" arguement is pure nonsense. If the experiments didn't work, why would people do them? Working with animals is expensive, messy, smelly and (because of terrorist nutters like the ALF) dangerous. Noone would do these experiments if there were alternatives.

Using other species for human medical research is pointless. Diseases operate on a cellular level. What goes into and out of a cell is determined by specific biochemical reactions. These reactions are controlled by genes. Genes are what makes something a different species.

Developing and testing drugs using HUMAN tissue cultures is more accurate and reliable.

Animal experiments exist because they are easier, cheaper, and quicker, thus generate profits more rapidly. Pharmaceutical companies put these considerations first.

Tim, I suggest you read this before you make up your mind about vivisection.

 http://vivisection-absurd.org.uk/fraud.html

Do you really think human diseases which don't even exist in animals can be cured by looking at the latter?

Warm regards,
Ritchie

 http://www.primateprison.org

Yes animals and humans are different but they are also extremely similar. Not all processes in the cell are goverend by genetics, some of them are just chemical reactions, and seeing as we share nearly 100% of our genes with most mammals a lot of the processes are exactly the same.

Agreed, testing on human tissue culture is more accurate. But not much good for some things as nobody has yet managed to grow a human respiratory system in the lab for testing on. Maybe the anti-vivisectionists would prefer all this testing to be performed on human embryos instead?

Like most people, I don't agree with animals being tested on....unless it's necessary. I don't see the anti-vivisectionists queueing up to have the latest experimental and powerful drugs tested on them.

Most people would support your stance against vivisection but using blatantly false, sweeping statements like, "Animal testing has never saved a human life" is only going to harm your campaign and convince people that you are pointless idiots who don't really know what they are talking about.

I have a lot more respect for the people who realise that testing of drugs is necessary and that currently animals are the best thing to test them on but are campaigning for new ways of testing etc. At least they are showing some signs of living in the real world rather than just having a knee jerk mouth-frothing reaction to the thought of anything with fur being tested on.

There's no need to test cosmetics etc. on animals, that was just pointless suffering for aesthetic reasons. But I'd imagine the people who have been allowed a fuller life through cancer treatments, diabetes treatments and all the other things which would never have happened if someone hadn't tested on animals to see what something does and refine the formula until it is as safe as possible for use on humans would disagree that animal testing has no point.

Do yourselves a favour and use sensible arguments rather than just outright lies to try to trick people into supporting you.

I am not convincied by the anti-vivisection arguemnents cited, interesting though they are. I've no reason to believe that the information provided on the website-link is anything but true. The arguement that animal experiments are useless is just not the logical conclusion from the information cited.

1,It is true that the response of an organism to a toxin or drug in to a large extend governed by that orgamism's genes.

2,Genes vary between and within species. Humans share almost all of there genes with other humans (although there are some differences- people have different hair colour to each other and some people will tolerate a drug and others will be allergic to it.

3,Humans share about 60% of their genes with plants (mercury is poisonous to both plants and humans), about 90% with slugs, about 97% with mice and about 98% with chimps.

4,Results gained in one species cannot automatically be extrapolated to another species. However the response of an animal to a chemical agent is often the best indication that we have of the humans response. The differences in response between species may itself sometimes yield interesting information. If I was a scientist studying the mechanism of human antimony poisoning (which I am not) in order to perhaps find an antidote, I would be very interested in the fact that the metal is hardly poisonous at all to certain animal species. It I could understand how sheep avoid poisoning, prehaps humans could learn those tricks too?

5,There is an 80% overlap between medical and vetinary drugs. Many (although not all) antibiotics, for example work in both animals and humans.

6,No drug is absolutely safe even if it has been tested on animals. However, animal testing can eliminate some of the most dangerous drug-candidates. Even if drugs were tested on humans (either in an unethical Nazi-type situation, or carefully on human volenteers as is currently required in phase I clinical trials) they would not be completely safe because different people (because of their genes) may have different drug reactions.

7,To say that the only reason pharmaceutical companies test on animals is because they want a quick result is partly true. People with diseases also want quick results.

8,Scientific research and drug development is extremely difficult. It is complicated by many factors. The differences in biology between different organisms is one of those complicating factors (it is also what, in my opinion, makes Biology the most interesting science) and it is a complcating factor which everyone involved knows about and has to deal with in a sensible and pragmatic way. There are many things that can be extrapolated between species. For example:

DNA, and not protein, was confirmed to be the genetic material by experiments on viruses and bacteria (this truth is directly applicable to human medicine)

The genetic code was deciphered by cell-free in vitro experiements using biological material variously isolated from bacteria, wheat-germ and rabbit red blood cells. With the exception of a few very unusual hot-spring bacteria, the same code is used throughout the plant, fungi and animal kingdom. An understanding of this is directly applicable to therapy for human genetic defects.

Diabetes was demonstrated to be caused by a lack of insulin from the pancreas by experiments on dogs. Essentially, the pancreas was removed from a dog. This caused the dog to develop diabetes and eventually die unless injections of insulin were given. I would feel pretty uncomfortable about that experiment on a dog and I am not sure if the inenvitable suffering caused to the dog can be justified on a moral level. However, the experiment provided the proof on concept that lead to the treatment of human diabetes by insulin injection and the saving of thousands of human lives. It truely is a moral dilemma

I don't argue that animal experiments are always the answer. Alternatives are available in some cases and should be use in order to reduce animal suffering. there are also some circumstances where alternatives are more accurate or cheaper. More alternatives are needed and pressure must be put on those who do animal experiements to make them as pain free as possible. However, at the moment, there are a certain number of scientific and medical questions that can only be answered by experiments on animals. Animals are important, but humans more so.


Background note,

In case anyone is interested, my background is as follows:
BSc in Biology and then a PhD in HIV Immunology. I haven't ever done any animal experiemnts myself (although I have used reagents - chiefly anibodies- in my research that were produced in animals). I worked in a large medical school and many of my collegues (especially those involved with cancer research) did use animals. In order to inform myself, I visited the animal house in our department on a number of occassions. I only ever saw mice being used in experiments and although I never saw any significant pain or suffering, the fact remains that it wasn't a pleasant place to be. I never saw any experiment being done for the hell of it and my "animal collegues" were all keen to avoid animal experiments as much as possible. I did see interesting and possibly medically useful results come out of that animal house and so I guess that on a rational level, I support animal experiments. I do however admit to the whole business leaving an unpleasant taste in my mouth and I am glad that I now do an office job have therefore managed to duck the issue of whether I myself would be prepared to do animal experiments (moral cowardice, I know).

I am therefore sympathetic to the anti-vivisection movement. It just really pisses me off when I hear the standard lie about animal experiments being useless. It would make the issue much easy to deal with philosophically if they were useless, but unfortunately life is very complicated and the ackward fact the animal experiments save lives remains.

Hopefully this will stimulate some further discussion

In peace

Tim

As you can tell from the comments on this post, using the 'Bad Science' argument causes too many arguments which cannot be truely answered by anyone outside the sick industry itself. What we can say is that HLS falsify results and torture animals for the hell of it. This is what should be argued, not that humans and animals are different.

If Tim & co think it's ok to torture, murder and incinerate animals in the name of profit and bogus science, the same animals that we love and cherish in our homes and in the wild. Then F*ck 'em. Are they really worth bothering with?? So up their own arses with the crap they've digested from the state, their compassion has been obliterated. We can't hang around and wait!

The march goes ahead with or without them!

Hi, just a quick note to say. I will be there for this march. I hope you all will too.

I am a nurse and have a degree in biology. It seems clear to me that animal experiments have saved human lives. I leave the ethics of this to others but those that get all flustered about animal experiments should reflect on the thousands of animals killed for food every day....

If you really cared you would picket the local abbatoir where animals are killed to satisfy our whims.

You animal rights lot just look a bit silly to me.

nine of us will be at the cambridge march on saturday. See ya there!

Can anyone tell me which of these ground breaking medical discoveries took place at Huntingdon Life Sciences?!

Huntingdon Life Sciences do not develop drugs. The vast majority of their work actually involves carrying out toxicology tests for chemical companies, and a much smaller proportion of their business involves safety-testing drugs.

When medicines are safety tested on animals, statistics show that up to 90 percent of these substances are actually withdrawn during phase one clinical trials due to their toxicity to humans. How then, does testing drugs on animals ensure their safety to humans?

People do volunteer to take part in drug testing - this is what clinical trials are. They are paid well for this, and their lives are not put at risk because they are given very small quantities of the drug, and very sensitive tests are used to measure the effects on their body. On the other hand, laboratory animals do not volunteer, are not paid, have to live in unpleasant conditions, and have no chance of surviving because Government regulations state that any animal used in an experiment must be killed at the end of it.

Animal rights campaigners are very aware of the millions (not thousands) of animals killed every day for food. This is why most people involved in such campaigning choose to turn vegan, so they are no longer paying for and condoning this slaughter.

For people reading indymedia, some of the comments I’ve seen here surprise me, as it seems a lot of people have been sucked in and brainwashed by the smearing of animal rights campaigners by the mainstream media.

Phase I clinical trials are a safe as they can reasonably be. This is because:

1,They are carried out on healthy volunteers (usually only on men; if they were done on women there would be a risk of damaging an embryo if that woman was unknowingly pregnant)

2,Dosage is carefully controlled and the volunteers carefully monitored

3,The most dangerous drug-candidate have already been excluded from the trials based on animal and non-animal (cell culture) toxicity data.

I resent the implication that readers of Indymedia should subscribe to all "alternative" views. Just because I strongly support human rights doesn't mean that I support animal rights too. Animals should be treated with care and consideration, but they don't have rights in the fundamental sense that humans do. It disturbs me that as a country the UK gives more money to the RSPCA than to the NSPCC. One of the first prosecutions in England for Child neglect was carried out under animal welfare laws because there wasn't an equivalent law against cruelty to humans. Of course it is easier to give rights to animals because they can't disagree with you or answer back. Human rights are harder because they need to be given to everyone including enemys who are bad and who you don't like

Animal welfare- yes. Animal rights- No

Most of the procedures at HLS are for safety testing of non-medicial products as are about 5% of total UK procedures. Pesticides, paints, food, cleaning products and chemicals etc are tested for toxicity as well as medicines.

SOme of the strongest arguments against the GM crops are founded on animal experiments. FOr example GM potatos when fed to rats caused weightloss and gut abnormalities. If you believe the nonsense about animal experiments being of no use to human health issues, you logically must conclude that the potato-rat experiments are nothing to worry about. Personally, I am worried by these results because I think that the rat experiments might be relevant to humans and I would like to see further experiments of this sort done in order to find out if GM spuds are safe or not.

Hello,
Without trying to offend anyone or push my views on people, i do resent the comment Bob made on 'animal welfare- yes, animal rights, no.' I wish to put forward the argument that, taking into consideration that human life is important and i am not trying to say that humans and animals have exactly the same emotions etc. Anyone who wishes to understand the case for animla rights should perhaps read petter singers book animal liberation. Animals are, in my view, creature like us, sensient beings with centeral nervous systems, emotions and rights like we have rights. I have been brought up veggie and now im vegan and my family are AR so im afraid i cant understand how anyone could possibly deny an animal rights, this is narrow minded of me and i apologise for this. Animals feel pain, stress, terror and love as we do. Just because they cant speak to us should we torture them? If a child was born with severe brain damage and had the same 'intellegence' level as a dog, would you allow vivisectionists to experiment on it? On animal welfare, it is relevent and wonderful work that people do. Although why, for example, are you aking for a bigger cage for the animal? Next you may want the cage to be painted pretty pastel colours so the animal is happy as its head is cut open. We should be asking, who gave us the right to put that animal in a cage? People used to atrgue that black people had no feeling and vivisect on them, now we use non human animals instead, which is wrong. Although sayoing that i do not mean to offend any animal welfare people, the work is brillian,a nd we need to keep the animal as humanely as possible, i do feel, however that ultimatly they should not be kept at all. I do not think that animal reserch is benificial to human health but i am not qualified to comment on that as i do nto know enough about it like the other people whoi have degrees and stuff, and im still in school so i dont really have much expoeriace about anything, this is just my opinion. Also i don't think its fair to say the ALF are terrorist nutters at all, like the ALFSG stuff says, were the people who broke down Hitlers death camps tresspassing, or vandalising and were those who freed the slaves of the south thieves? Thank you for taking the time to read this.
G
ps we will be on the march

They might do and they might not? You mustn't assume anything

Most of the animal rights people are of course not terrorists. Some of them have been.

Wasn't there a bomb at Bristol University a few years ago and haven't cars of HLS employees been set alight on peoples drives? Is this not torrorism?

Without getting into the arguement about whether animals should have rights or not, can't we agree that animal rights at best must be equal to human rights and not exceed them. Don't all humans, including "evil" HLS employees enjoy the human rights of security of person and freedom from fear.

No one has a right against being anoyed, challenged or argued with, but care must be taken that this don't tip over into harrisment as it occassionally has done at HLS.

I disagree that animals should have the same rights as humans. I also don't see anything wrong with supporting animal welfare but not supporting animal rights. Currently we do not have the technology to perform certain tests without the use of animals - tests that are necessary to save human lives.

I can give an example of one right now. It is something called the LAL test. There is no other way of performing this test except by using the blood of horseshoe crabs (and believe me, people have been looking for a cheaper, less awkward way of performing this test). It is a test for endotoxins (also known as pyrogens - the breakdown products of bacteria) which is necessary to perform on batches of drugs which are to be injected into patients. As an injection bypasses nearly all of the body's defences - skin, digestive tract etc. - it is critical to ensure that no infection is going to be passed by these drugs. And if you think that such a thing is unnecessary and has had no bearing on saving human life then just look back a few hundred years to a time when we did nothing to stop wounds being infected. See if you can spot the difference between then and now....

If it is necessary to utilise animals in testing to save human lives then why shouldn't we make the experience as painless and stress-free as possible for the animals?

I agree that it would be better not to need to do any animal testing at all but the way to ensure this is to research other ways of testing and find other methods that are as efficient. This is not very easy but it IS happening.

And as for your final point:

Yes the people who broke down Hitler's concentration camps were trespassing and vandalising. That has nothing to do with whether they were right or wrong to do so but they were entering someone else's property and damaging it without their permission - that's what trespassing and vandalising are.

Equally, ALF 'nutters' who are quite happy to send death threats to the families of doctors (and even cleaners!) working at HLS are attempting to scare people into doing what they are told by threats of violence. Which, I think you'll find, is terrorism whether you agree with the activities at HLS or not.

The SHAC website includes phone numbers for HLS suppliers (not just those involved directly in experiments but also cleaners and lorry drivers). Despite SHAC so called "disclaimers" the publication of these numbers is tacit encoragement to phone up these people and harrass and threaten them. It is also not a million miles away from the strategy that is used by the Fascists who run the Redwatch website and which has been rightly condemmed by many people on this site.

The desciption "terrorist nutters" would seem appropriate

There is a difference between demonstrating and harrassment. It also concerns me that SHAC targets the workers as well as the bosses. Care must be taken that humans are not dehumanised.

Perhaps people wouldn't be so ignorant about the striking similarities between human and animal physiology if the "animal rights nutters" hadn't succeded in stopping animal disection (mortisection not vivisection) in schools, thereby producing a generation of ignorant kids to swallow SHAC's lies and march on HLS.

What's so 'fascistic' about saving animals lives? When the resistance were saving Jews from basically the same fate as our animal brothers and sisters suffer today, they were not known as 'fascists'.

Like ... ... ... ...GO AWAY ... ... .. . YEAH?

Jews are human. So is Brain Cass (however much we disagree with him). Rabbits are not unimportant, but they are just animals.

(how far back along the evolutionary chain do animal rights go? Is it just furry animals that get rights, or do insects, fish and worms get them too? What about plants?
)

I have been campaigning for the closure of Huntingdon Life Sciences for a number of years now, and I am proud of this.

I have been on marches, I have taken part in office occupations, I've collected signatures, I've made phone calls, written letters, sent emails, and have stood outside the gates holding a placard and blowing a whistle. There is now an injunction preventing me from doing most of these things, be it directly towards HLS or towards particular companies that employ HLS to carry out experiments for them. If I break the injunction, I could face up to five years in prison.

Is it any wonder that animal rights campaigners have sometimes resorted to going underground and carrying out criminal damage, when such draconian laws are constantly thrown at them?

I think it is also worthy to mention that the ALF has never killed a person, whereas five (yes five) animal rights campaigners have been killed whilst protesting in the UK.

Yes, SHAC publish details of people who are involved in carrying out experiments at HLS, or people who are willing to make money from this. How can people protest against something that they think is wrong, if they do not know who is doing it?

We do not need to use animals to test agrochemicals, cleaning products, paints or drugs. As mentioned previously, the best that drug testing on other species can do is screen out the most dangerous products. This can be done using microbiological and tissue culture methods.

The vast majority of medical research in the UK in fact does not use animals. Several research foundations exist purely to further the progress in non-animal methods. For example, I strongly recommend that people find out more about the Dr Hadwen Trust and the Lord Dowding Fund, before they decide that animal methods are the only way.

 http://www.crueltyfreeshop.com/drhadwen/
 http://www.navs.org.uk/research/about/ldf.htm

I think that murdering animals is wrong. No matter how many people it would save. How would you feel if someone tested something dangerous on one of your family members and killed them? Yeah pretty bad. So think about animals have feelings too. And they have just as many rights as humans do. If you want to do your useless test find something else besides animals.