Vegesoc

[mottthehoople]

[s]Steveo wrote on 17:56, 26th Oct 2004:
[s]mottthehoople wrote on 17:45, 26th Oct 2004:[i]
I believe that you should steal a mouses mind in order to fing the cheese.


Mice do not actually like cheese.






How the devil do you know, have you ever stole a mouses mind. I tink not

[the Empress]

I read an article a few years ago about testing animal self-recognition. Great Apes for example can recognise themselves in a mirror, so supposedly has greater self-awareness than dogs, who don't associate the image with themselves. The article pointed out that since dogs rely on a keen sense of smell, rather than sight, the same form of intelligence testing can't be applied to both dogs and apes. Yet medical testing on primates is banned, and its OK to test dogs, who have been unfairly tested? Dogs may be just as intensely aware and understanding of their enviornment as primates, increasing their suffering.

I'm ambiguous on animal testing though - against cosmetic testing (banned in the UK anyway), and testing when alternatives available. Medicinal testing for serious conditions I can understand-and I can't bring myself to believe scientists evilly decide to inflict unnessecary pain on animals.

It does struck me as pointless to have a boycott of certain charity shops and not tell them that you're doing so (or anyone else who isn't in Vegesoc)-if anyone noticed there were fewer customers, the conclusion would be that their stock/store look wasn't appealing, not that you had an ethical objection!

[Steveo]

[s]mottthehoople wrote on 18:48, 26th Oct 2004:

How the devil do you know, have you ever stole a mouses mind. I tink not


You don't appear to tink at all.

[hr]
[s]What a beautiful world this will be .... what a glorious time to be free[/s]

[oddly familiar]

[s]Haunted wrote on 18:41, 26th Oct 2004:
so why do they keep getting caught in those traps baited with it?


Apparantly, the favourite food of a mouse is peanut butter, unless they are mice from Birmingham, in which case they prefer chocolate. wierd huh?

ok - i apologise for what is basically an essay that follows, but here goes:

Anyway - back regarding the animal testing thing:
99% of all drugs that are invented fail at the animal testing stage, for whatever reason; often they cause abnormalities in offspring, or injury/death to the subject animal. Obviously there are other reasons why a drug can fail - it might be found not to actually do anything. Nevertheless, most drugs fail due to the side effects they cause, that are detected by animal testing.
In addition, I beleive its something in the region of 90% of drugs fail at the human testing stage.

Let us imagine a hypothetical situation where all animal testing for drug research has been banned. There are thousands of drugs in production at the moment. If we imagine that there are only 5000 drugs being produced in the world (i have no idea exactly how many there are, but its definately more than this), then lets do the maths.

5000 x 9 = 45,000.
This is how many drugs fail in the human testing stage. This means that there are 50,000 drugs (including the 5000 that do pass the human testing stage) that pass the animal testing stage.
This is 1% of all drugs produced. so the other 99% of drugs fail. this is:

50,000 x 99 = 4,950,000 failed drugs

Im not sure how accurate this number is, but bearing in mind the facts ive been given, i must assume that it is correct.
if we had no animal testing, then we would have to try all of these drugs out on humans. Bearing in mind that most of these drugs will have horrible to fatal consequences, we're talking about destroying the lives of 4.9 million people. This is a significantly larger number than the entire population of scotland. If youre scottish, imagine everybody you know either very ill, dead, or with deformed children.

The drugs we produce save many millions of more lives than that every year.

Then bear in mind that it takes several test to sometimes detect problems with drugs. Thalidomide has already been mentioned. the majority of mothers using Thalidomide had no problems with their babies, yet there was a small percentage that did, which resulted in hundreds of congenitally malformed babies. Thus to test for possible problems with a drug, many subjects must be tested on for each drug. This means that probably each drug must have at least 100 subjects to test on, maybe more, to maintain experimental validity.
This leads to 100 x 4,950,000 = 495,000,000 subjects at the least. Admittedly that is spread out over many years, but nevertheless if we're talking people instead of animals, thats almost 1/12 of the entire current population of the world that we would have to use for experimentation.

As i think i've demonstrated, we cannot test on humans. So the only choice we have is to test on animals, or not to have any drugs.

If you beleive that each animal life is worth the same as a human life, then I can see why you might not want to use this huge number of animals (and these are conservative estimates at best) for testing purposes. If you dont feel that an animal life is worth that of a human life, then surely in order to save lives, then we have to experiment on animals.

Your choice. Maybe people who are against animal testing should not useany drugs that are tested on animals. In that way it would be similar to vegetarianism - if you dont beleive in using animals, then dont use the products you get from them. Of course, that means no drugs that have been developed in the last 50years....

[oddly familiar]

The only reason I bring this up is because I read in the newspaper a few weeks back that 46% of people our age in this country are against animal testing for ANY reason.

Those are the people who I think should be given the option to opt (if they want to) out of treatments that involved animal testing at any stage in their development.

[Guest]

so how about we boycott vegesoc instead?

[Guest]

[s]Mr Comedy wrote on 13:58, 26th Oct 2004:
If you want to make a case, it ought to be more convincing than that.


But surely with the emotive language in that website (british *heartless* something or ever - oh how clever) we should just feel guilty and therefore do whatever the website says?!

Oh no wait a minute, some people have a thing called common sense which knows that websites like that are no more unbiased than the company/charity whose name they are trying to drag through the mud.

I see nothing in that site which is not distorting the truth or trying to reason with the brain rather than pull at heart strings by appalingly obvious emotive language. That really is sad - trying to misinform people who know no better. Tut tut.

The UK has some of the strictest laws in animal testing and any experiment that can be done without animals is done so.

[Anon.]

[s]KateBush wrote on 16:07, 26th Oct 2004:
Hey, if they could stop me fainting and battering myself I'd be happy! My blood pressure keeps dropping, has done for over 9 years and no one has ever really been able to figure out what to do to stop it, short of telling me to smoke, eat lard and drink compulsively!

...?