Why Does Animal Experimentation Continue?
by Vernon Coleman, MDWith all the evidence available today to demonstrate their uselessness, it is difficult to avoid the sad but inevitable conclusion that animal experiments are used because they are financially expedient. Animals are not just relatively cheap to use but their exploitation has also clear commercial advantages for the world’s most successful and ruthless industry, the drug industry.
The bizarre but unavoidable conclusion is that drug companies depend on the fact that animal experiments are unreliable in order to get their new products onto the market without testing them properly. The very unreliability and unpredictability of animal experiments makes them valuable . . . strange to say!
Drug companies test on animals so that they can say that they have tested their drugs before marketing them. If the tests show that the drugs do not cause serious disorders when administered to animals, the manufacturers say: 'There you are! We have tested our drug - and have proved it to be safe.' If, on the other hand, tests show that a drug does cause serious problems when administered to animals, the manufacturers say: 'The animal experiments are, of course, inconclusive and cannot be used to predict what will happen when the drug is given to humans. We have, however, tested our drug.' To disguise the real (i.e. commercial) reasons for performing animal experiments, drug companies will sometimes claim that they are required to do so by law. But this is not true.
Animal experiments have been used for so long and by so many scientists that thousands of reputations would be irrevocably shattered if it were accepted by the research industry that the work it has been at for so many years was fatally flawed.
It is remarkably quick and simple to plan, research, write and publish scientific papers if you are using animals. Decent and useful research, involving human patients, is much harder to organise - and since most of the biomedical scientists using animals are not medically qualified, most of them would not, in any case, be allowed to perform any sort of clinical research.
Prolific publishing is the best way to ensure a steady income from grants. It is the quantity, not the quality, of research which governs the financial results. The charities, which pay for much of the animal research, want to fill their annual reports with impressive and optimistic accounts of research-in-progress.
The myth that animal experiments are of value to doctors and patients is sustained because the vast majority of doctors---the only people who could expose the absurd rigmarole for the sham that it is---are either uninterested in how drugs are tested (and apathetic to the dishonesty involved) or are so beholden to the industry that they are unwilling or unable to criticise it.