Can Medical Research on Animals be Justified?

In his attempt to excuse the horrific and painful abuse of animals in laboratories, Wesley J. Smith accuses animal rights advocates of using arguments against animal experimentation that are “intellectually dishonest and factually unsupportable.” But his own position is undermined by dubious reasoning and misleading concealment.

 

For example, he relies on the tired tactic of incompletely quoting PETA President Ingrid Newkirk as saying, “A rat, is a pig, is a dog, is a boy.” What she really said, in full, is, “When it comes to pain, love, joy, loneliness, and fear, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” PETA understands that there are differences, as well as similarities, between humans and other animals—those differences are critical to understanding our opposition to experimentation on animals.

 

The organization Mr. Smith represents, the Discovery Institute (DI), gives the appearance of being an objective think tank, but is dedicated to advancing a specific faith-based viewpoint on issues such as abortion, evolution, and assisted suicide. (PETA takes no position on these issues; we only address matters affecting animals.) It would appear that Mr. Smith’s primary motivation is not to further scientific knowledge, but to promote continued reliance on the flawed animal-experimentation model in order to avoid the use of technologies such as stem-cell research which DI opposes on moral grounds—while ignoring the ethical implications of exploiting and killing nonhuman beings.

 

It’s hardly surprising, then, that Mr. Smith chooses a failed stem-cell experiment as the basis for his argument. Because several rats developed tumors in this one experiment, he concludes that this test saved humans from the same fate. By this logic, however, humans should never have been given aspirin since it is fatal to cats. Fluoride would not be available to prevent tooth decay because it causes cancer in rats. Many other helpful medications—including digitalis, streptomycin, cortisone, Inderal, Lasix, and Prilosec—would be lost to us, since they showed complications during animal testing.

 

Taking a healthy being from a completely different species, artificially inducing a condition, keeping him or her in an unnatural and stressed condition, and trying to apply the "results" to naturally occurring diseases in human beings is scientifically dubious at best. Furthermore, physiological reactions to drugs vary enormously from species to species, and even treatments that passed testing in animals can cause harm to humans. Vioxx, Celebrex, Cylert, Halcion, and Clioquinol are just a few of the medications that have caused illness—sometimes fatal—in humans, despite the supposed precaution of animal testing.

 

Studies have found that chemicals that cause cancer in rats only caused cancer in mice 46 percent of the time—that's about the same as flipping a coin. If extrapolating from rats to mice is so problematic, how can we apply results from mice, rats, guinea pigs, rabbits, cats, dogs, monkeys, and other animals to humans? Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, remarked, "How fortunate we didn't have these animal tests in the 1940s, for penicillin would probably have never been granted a license, and probably the whole field of antibiotics might never have been realized."

 

In a sad irony, DI draws inspiration from the writing of C. S. Lewis ( http://www.discovery.org/cslewis/ ), but ignores his opposition to experimentation on animals. In an essay on vivisection, Lewis wrote, “The victory of vivisection marks a great advance in the triumph of ruthless, non-moral utilitarianism over the old world of ethical law; a triumph in which we, as well as animals, are already the victims and of which Dachau and Hiroshima mark the more recent achievements. … I wish they would remember that the charge to Peter was ‘Feed my sheep,’ not ‘Try experiments on my rats,’ or even ‘Teach my performing dogs new tricks.’”