Jun 222009
I completely understand why people have ethical or moral reasons for vegetarian. Personally, I’ll put anything into my mouth, as long as someone, somewhere has considered it food.
It seems to me that high concentrations of atheists are also vegetarian.
When Flimsy was single, his mother used to tell him things like, “You’d better not wear so much black. You’ll attract the wrong kind of girl”. By wrong kind, she meant atheist, with tattoos and piercings, and vegetarian.
I had to tell his mother no less than five times over the course of the first six months we were dating that; in fact, I love to eat dead animals.
I’d really like to know the percentage of atheists who are vegetarian. Are you? Why or why not? Should we be?
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hese rats/monkies/dogs most likely will die. The study examines if their comrades treated with the vaccine die as much. This keeps us from injecting worthless meds into people. intentionally infecting a human being with a disease IS torture and a human rights violation. We do it on animals so it will not have to be done on people. It’s the best we got.
One of the arguments I’ve seen opponents of animal testing use is that animals don’t necessarily respond the same way as humans. But I’ve yet to see hard numbers on what percentage of the time this is the case.
A related ethical issue: what about brainless human clones kept alive by artificial means for medical testing?
I have no idea of when or if that would ever be possible but, if it is, what would you think of it?”
This is actually VERY possible and conceivable in the near future. A big hurtle in it’s research is the ethical concerns, but it’d be actually (relatively) easy to engineer a zygote to produce no brain. The condition occurs not uncommonly in nature, though of course that being is still born.
“Many studies published in the scientific literature comparing drug side effects in humans and animals have found animal tests to be less predictive than a coin toss.”
Again BULLSHIT. Do you think we LIKE wasting our own time? Get a clue.
Again that whole argument is absurd. Do you really think people like me in my field are sitting around jerking off as we pull off cat heads KNOWING that the data is useless because the physiology is too different?
In one of the books I’m currently reading with essays from both sides of several animal rights issues, there’s a paper by Kathy Archibald on the subject of drug testing on animals that claims its done more for legal than scientific reasons (to reduce the possibility of effective lawsuits).
Here are a few quotes:
“Many studies published in the scientific literature comparing drug side effects in humans and animals have found animal tests to be less predictive than a coin toss.”
“Dr Albert Sabin, the inventor of the polio vaccine, swore under oath that the vaccine ‘was long delayed by the erroneous conception of the nature of the human disease based on misleading experimental models of [it] in monkeys.’”
“Penicllin, the world’s first antibiotic, was delayed for more than 10 years by misleading results from experiments in rabbits…..Sir Alexander Fleming himself said: ‘How fortunate we didn’t have these animal tests in the 1940’s, for penicillin would probably never have been granted a licence, and possibly the whole field of antibiotics might never have been realized.’”
I’m currently reading the opposing article on the same topic but it doesn’t seem to address most of the specific points in the other article. And none of the articles have endnotes citing their sources (though they do tell where the articles were originally published so maybe I’ll be able to find the sources from them—its going to be a hassle having to search out all those different journals and publications though).
James, you’re going to have to provide better evidence then that. A homeopath, acupuncturist, or psychic could say the exact same thing in response to someone telling them that their brand of pseudoscience does not work – that results of studies are bullshit, that they would not waste their time, and to get a clue.
Also, I can’t believe this post has gotten so many comments.
I wasn’t endorsing the idea. I, in fact, find it rather suspicious. Which is why I wish the book cited sources.
But saying “bullshit”, no matter how emphatically, is not evidence to the contrary either.
I’m going to try to track down hard numbers on the effectiveness of animal testing at my college library to be more confident what I’m reading hasn’t been filtered according to anyone’s agenda.
Okay, not that much pressed for time this time, but then overwhelmed by the extent this comment thread has developed.
After reading through most of the dicussion, my brain feels like a hornets’ nest. All I can add is a big
THANK YOU to everyone, for making it impossible for me to just sit down and enjoy my meal. Now I am doomed to weeks, or months, or maybe even years of brooding over my schnitzel sandwich, pondering the pros and cons of eating it. You guys *really* helped me :-P
Good point. Let me cite some quotations then
According to the British Royal Society, nearly every medical achievement in the 20th century is attributable to experiments conducted on animals. The following ailments would likely still be prevalent in the United States today without research conducted on the bodies of animals over the last 100 years: whooping cough, diphtheria and polio.
A link to the http://www.oprs.ucla.edu/animal/about guidelines about how animal testing is used.
I’d say Zitar the difference between the psionic and homephaty is that the science actually produces results. You can see and measure the medicine and treatments discovered. The difference is also one of profit. For homeopath and psionics it is in their commercial interest to call bullshit and NOT test, they don’t want to be proven right. For pharmacies, testing is THE major obstical to getting a drug to market. Is it true that “many drugs with bad side effects” show up on the market despite testing. Yes, but what the animal rights nuts DON’T tell you is that many many many more drugs wind up NOT put on the market due to the testing. Many drugs never make it out of the gate due to phase one and two testing. Testing takes years, it is incredibly expensive and time consuming. For comparison I know from my socical network of every possible ‘breakthroughs’ in cancer research we probably won’t see for 12 years at least due to testing. If animal testing were useless pharmacies would cut it out of their budget like THAT. It’d be a waste of money, a waste of time, and contrary to the best interests of the company. Some pharmacy industrialists are sleaze balls who release unsafe products despite the tests, but all in all they work for the best interest of the profit. Testing is not profitable…it’s a sink hole.
“According to the researcher, the vast majority of conducted experiments involve simple cognitive tasks, such as hitting a button to receive a pellet. When I asked if the remaining experiments were more invasive, he told me the most pain his subjects ever experience are due to injections that last no more than a few seconds, a quick, fleeting burst of pain like you might experience when you stub your toe.
In addition, veterinary staff is always present in these laboratories, and the health and living conditions of the animals are consistently monitored. I’m not trying to paint the laboratory as some sort of rodent-primate utopia, but it’s far from the Inquisition-era torture chamber you’ll find in the Peta videos”