Animal testing blathering...

Over on OregonLive, I’m in the midst of the usual silly blathering with folks whose defense of animal testing is ill-considered and defaults to the status quo, and human benefit uber alles. This is typical.

The animal rights case against animal testing is one of simple decency: that humans derive benefit from animal testing is irrelevant. That humans have tested drugs and other medical treatments on other animals for a very long time is also irrelevant.

Animal rights holds that animals possess intrinsic value, and no not merely exist as a means to an end, any more than humans exist as a means to an end for other humans.

We recognize that animal testing isn’t going away tomorrow, or any time soon, but we recognize that no aspect of animal exploitation is disappearing in the near term. But we still have a moral obligation to speak out against it, because things will never change so long as we sit silent.

The argument is simple; where we do not now have good, scientifically valid alternatives to the use of animals in research, develop them. Don’t rest on the status quo, simply because humans have benefitted from that status quo for as long as any of us have been alive. Where we do currently have viable alternatives (human tissue studies, using excised tumors, for example) use them. In many cases, where viable alternatives are available, they’re not actually being used because animal testing, like every other form of animal exploitation, is a profitable business.

Huntingdon Life Sciences, a frequent target of AR actions, reports annual profits in the region of $50 million a year or more, on annual revenues close to $200 million a year. In 2007, Financial Times ran an op-ed, in which HLS managing director Brian Cass justified further investment from the financial sector on HLS given its profitability:

Regulatory filings show the US company had 47 clients placing orders for more than $1m last year, and reported gross profits up 5 per cent to $50m on revenues of $192m.

 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1554a4b6-646c-11dc-90ea-0000779fd2ac.html

Don’t buy into the “necessity” argument: the animal testing industry is an industry, like any other form of large scale, ongoing animal exploitation. It does not exist altruistically.

We accept that change will not come soon - but it must come.