Just another dent in the damage...

With a little tweking this could go a long way.

An adult gorilla has the same ability to use language, the same complex emotions, and the same capacity to feel pain as a three-year-old human child, or many disabled adults. So we should only use that gorilla in an experiment if we would also use a three-year-old child or a disabled adult with comparable mental functioning ‘€“ an abhorrent situation I cannot imagine ever sanctioning.

The basics from Newsround:

Practical argument

• Animal testing can be misleading.
• An animal’s response to a drug can be different to a human’s.
• Successful alternatives include test tube studies on human tissue cultures, statistics and computer models.
• The stress that animals endure in labs can affect experiments, making the results meaningless.
• Animals are still used to test items like cleaning products, which benefit mankind less than medicines or surgery.

Moral argument

• Animals have as much right to life as human beings.
• Strict controls have not prevented researchers from abusing animals.
• Deaths through research are absolutely unnecessary and are morally no different from murder.
• When locked up they suffer tremendous stress. Can we know they don’t feel pain?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 5th, 2006 at 11:19 am and is filed under News and tagged as animal rights, johann hari. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.