Animal Testing Statistics and Perspectives

There has been big ongoing debate on animal rights (and the extremists) on the science blogs for the past couple of weeks (some are here, here, here, here, here and here) and I didn't time to go through all the them yet. Becoming an animal rights extremist can never solve the problem but it will only worsen the problem. The extremists go against the very premise animals teach us - empathy and violence only takes away the focus from the issue. It will only make the issue more polarized and resolve nothing. A silent revolution can happen, we should learn that from Pepper's heartbreaking story (read that six part series on Slate on what happened to that dog and how it changed this country).

This post from today, has some great quotes from scientists voicing their concern against animal testing (this is one of those rare moments when I love that in-famous confirmation bias):

"I have been informed on this issue by the same researchers that originally inspired many of us to enter a career in science in the first place. Below are just a few quotes from some these scientists.

Humans--who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals--have had an understandable penchant for pretending that animals do not feel pain. On whether we should grant some modicum of rights to other animals, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham stressed that the question was not how smart they are, but how much torment they can feel. Darwin was haunted by this issue: "In the agony of death a dog has been known to caress his master, and every one has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless the operation was fully justified by an increase of our knowledge, or unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life."
From all criteria available to us--the recognizable agony in the cries of wounded animals, for example, including those who usually utter hardly a sound--this question seems moot. The limbic system in the human brain, known to be responsible for too much of the richness of our emotional life, is prominent throughout the mammals. The same drugs that alleviate suffering in humans mitigate the cries and other signs of pain in many other animals. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer.

Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, pp. 371-372.

The speciesist assumption that lurks here is very simple. Humans are humans and gorillas are animals. There is an unquestioned yawning gulf between them such that the life of a single human child is worth more than the lives of all the gorillas in the world. The 'worth' of an animal's life is just its replacement cost to its owner -- or, in the case of a rare species, to humanity. But tie the label Homo sapiens even to a tiny piece of insensible, embryonic tissue, and its life suddenly leaps to infinite, uncomputable value. This way of thinking characterises what I want to call the discontinuous mind.

Richard Dawkins, "Gaps in the Mind," In The Great Ape Project, pp. 81-87

Then ask yourself why those apes are on exhibition in cages, and why other apes are being used for medical experiments, while it is not permissible to do either of those things to humans. Suppose it turned out that chimps shared 99.9 per cent of their genes with us, and that the important differences between humans and chimps were due to just a few genes. Would you still think it is okay to put chimps in cages and to experiment on them? Consider those unfortunate mentally impaired people who have much less capacity to solve problems, to care for themselves, to communicate, to engage in social relationships and to feel pain, than do apes. What is the logic that forbids medical experiments on those people, but not on apes?

Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee, p. 15.

We come up, again and again, against that non-existent barrier that is, for so many, so real - the barrier between 'man' and 'beast'. It was erected in ignorance, as a result of the arrogant assumption, unfortunately shared by vast numbers of people, that humans are superior to nonhumans in every way. Even if nonhuman beings are rational and can suffer and feel pain and despair it does not matter how we treat them provided it is for the good of humanity - which apparently includes our own pleasure. They are not members of that exclusive club that opens its doors only to bona fide Homo sapiens. This is why we find double standards in the legislation regarding medical research. Thus while it is illegal to perform medical experiments on a brain-dead human being who can neither speak nor feel, it is legally acceptable to perform them on an alert, feeling and highly intelligent chimpanzee. Conversely, while it is legally permitted to imprison an innocent chimpanzee, for life, in a steel-barred, barren laboratory cell measuring five foot by five foot by seven foot, a psychopathic mass murderer must be more spaciously confined. And these double standards exist only because the brain-dead patient and the mass murderer are human.

Jane Goodall, "Chimpanzees - Bridging the Gap," in The Great Ape Project, pp. 10-18."