Considering Alternative Methods:
If you’re still in the camp ‘principally against anything anthropocentric’, then that’s fine. It also means you’re going to consider any animal testing outright wrong, if it’s purpose is to make discoveries for humans. That’s why alternative methods are so important, because they allow us to avoid human extinction – which would cause the extinction of all other animals – without committing the sins of humanity that Maheny talks about. If you’re pro-anthropocentric, but also get pleasure in needlessly slaughtering animals, then allow me to elaborate on just how ‘needless’ this slaughtering really is.
In 2015, the National Association for Biomedical Research reported 95% of animal testing done in America was conducted on mice. That’s like twenty-five million Henrys, twenty-five million has to mean something right? Well, yes, some of those trials are cutting edge
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Opponents to alternative methods will say they don’t exist, or when they do they don’t operate at the caliber research demands. They’ll claim living organisms are too complex to properly replicate these studies, and even though alternatives uphold animal welfare, they don’t provide adequate results. Sounds compelling, but hear me out, there are benefits to in vitro studies. Pharmacologist and biomedical scientist Kara Rogers PhD. states: “In vitro tests are capable of producing information about the biological effects of a test compound that are as accurate –and in some cases more accurate than–information collected from studies in whole animals.” Furthermore, as Núria Almiron and Natalie Khazaal point out, the justifications provided by the vivisection industry are merely a game of semantics. Words such as ‘caliber’, ‘properly’, and ‘adequate’, reduce the reader to a vulnerable position where they are primed to accept the logical reasoning presented by animal testing