I would happily support a world ban on cosmetic testing on animals. However medical testing is often a vital stage in the development of new drugs and new treatments for human disease. Whilst we should always be looking towards computer modelling and volunteer human subjects, there are occasions when animal testing is vital.

Animals are not people, and whilst all methods should be taken to ensure those that are used in testing are treated humanely and properly anaesthetised and humanely euthanised, an all out ban would seriously hinder the development of human medicine.

There should be more effective safeguards in place, better access to these facilites for independant auditing and monitoring etc and a shared testing data base between companies so knowledge is shared so the same experiements are not carried out again and again by differant companies due to competion ruling out data sharing and migration.

An all out ban would be detrimental to human scientific and medical development and therefor should not be persued.

In other words wolfskin means to let the testing go on. A pro-vivisectionist friend of the animal abuser. Glaxo have just admitted their drugs aren't working on humans yet millions of animals die under the guise of animal research.

Wolfskin seems part of the omnipresent master race that use the 'lower life forms' to further their own pointless cause which is to eat, shit, mate and not think.

Well done wolfskin, you strengthen the AR movement and make warriors out of those that are repulsed by your petty, pro-abuse arguments.

Wolfskin

I am glad to hear that you would like a ban on cosmetic testing on animals. I presume you would also like to see a ban on other luxury items ie new food colourants and detergents. I also presume that you would like to see an end to unecessary medical experiments such as tobacco research - we know that tobacco is harmful and can choose to avoid it, yet we keep on harming more and more animals to see exactly how harmful it is.
These bans would be great, most animal experiments would end if such a ban occured. I presume that you are out fighting for these bans, rather than just censuring those who DO go out and try to make changes - these things will never get banned without effort from us.

However, I find your support of medical experiments a little odd. I presume that you have researched this topic, and have seen the thousands of drugs that have gone on to injure or kill humans after being tested on animals, and the drugs whose development have been held up for many years due to misleading results from animal experiments. I obviously can not mention the drugs that have been rejected after harming animal but may have cured many human diseases, as we may never know of these. This is why many doctors and scientists would like to see an end of animal experiments.

As for the moral issue - even IF animal experiments will help us to cure illness faster, does this mean that they are ethical? The animals suffer tremendously during these experiments, for example from from overcrowding, boredom, fright, isolation, intentional abuse, and from the results of the experiments. They suffer just as we do, yet we think that it is acceptable to make them suffer where it would not be acceptable to make humans suffer. "But they're not as intelligent as we are!" is a common defence, but neither are mentally handicapped humans. Would it be acceptable to subject a human with the intelligence of a monkey to painful experiments in the hope of curing diseases faster? If not, then it is not acceptable to subject a monkey to them. If so, then we should ban animal experiments and use the mentally handicapped instead, as using humans in experiments will produce cures far far faster than animals would.

As for your comment about more safeguards - it would be wonderful if we could ensure that those undergoing medical experiments are kept happy and free from physical or mental pain. Unfortunately, it seems that this is not going to happen. Time and time again scientific institutions have been exposed for cruelty. Protection laws are minimal, and they are not enforced. Jobs with lab animals unfortunately tend to attract sadistic people rather than animal lovers. And many scientists are completely opposed to improving the animals' welfare, as this would be more costly and "if the animals have room to exercise and play then some will exercise more that others, so our results will not be accurate".

I personally do not think that there is anything wrong with killing animals (or humans for that matter) painlessly if they have had a happy life. And as a utilitarian, I would support vivisection if I thought that it prevented more suffering than it caused. But the vivisection industry is not trying to help people, it is trying to make money. If we stopped pouring money into experimenting on animals and gave it to those who are staving instead, then we would save many more lives than a cure for cancer would.

Check this newly released expose out to read and see what vivisection is all about -  http://www.shac.net/MISC/covanceundercover/covanceindex.html

One cannot ask an animal if they have had a happy life before 'painlessly' taking that life from them. Your latter personal comment Arp is ridiculous to the extreme. Psychotic and disturbed to say the least.

I support Wolfskin's points but at least Arp makes a reasoned argument - unlike L'n'L...

The uni appears to have an animal unit / house on tennis court rd cambridge where researchers from physiology and other depts breed, kill and cup up animals for experiments.