Perhaps you are already aware of some of the gruesome atrocities committed against living creatures in biomedical research and product testing and can't bear to think of all the suffering that goes on day after day, year after year, even if it means, as vivisectors are quick to warn, that medical advances would come to a stop.
You will be relieved to learn that there is really no conflict. The practice of vivisection (experimenting on animals) has actually retarded human health care because many new therapies based on the reactions of other species turn out to be harmful to human beings, or, conversely, therapies that have harmed animals have eventually turned out to be beneficial for humans.
Medical science has only recently determined that experimental data on human men does not necessarily apply to human women. How, then, can anyone believe that data obtained from mice is valid for human beings? In many cases it doesn't even apply to rats, let alone dogs, cats, monkeys or men, women and children.
Contrary to what you have been told, great medical discoveries of the past have originated from observations made while caring for injured or sick people, from autopsies on the bodies of people who had died, or from studies of human population groups. Later, vivisectors would attempt to inflict the same illness or injuries on animals in order to "prove" what they already knew.
You don't have to swallow this information all in one dose. The chances are you don't believe it right now because everything you have heard and read pays homage to modern medical miracles that "wouldn't be possible if it hadn't been for animal research."
For over a century, people who love animas have been trying to stop these experiments with no success They have failed because the vivisectors have always convinced the general public that it's better to experiment on a dog or a rat than a baby.
Only when the general public realizes that vivisection is not only cruel, but is only coincidentally applicable to humans, will we be able to put a stop to this dangerous, costly, and needless horror.
"Would you experiment on human beings then?" the practitioners of this pseudo-science ask. The answer is that they already do. Remember Baby Fae? And Barney Clark? The 400 underprivileged black men whose syphilis went untreated in order to study the progress of the disease? And now we are learning about the radiation studies on unsuspecting children and adults in the 1940s that are still being conducted on dogs and monkeys to the extent that disposing of their bodies has added to our radioactive waste problem.
Animal experiments do not prevent human beings from being experimented upon in any case. Whenever treatments and medications based on the reactions of other species are tried on them, human beings are experimental subjects. Fortunately, the safety of new therapies can more accurately be predicted by modern scientific methods such as human cell and organ cultures. Humans are still experimented upon when any new therapy is tried, but the chances of ill effects are reduced when the preliminary studies are based on human physiology rather than that of other species.
Only when enough people understand this will we be able to develop safer treatments for human maladies and put a stop to the needless suffering of millions of animals year after year.
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