• Question: What are your views on testing drugs on animals?

    Asked by laceyc to Amit, Emily, Joanne, Martin, Paige on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Paige Brown

      Paige Brown answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      Good question. My view is that it is a necessarily evil. When we talk about testing new medicines, these are drugs that could save human lives but that we HAVE to test in animals before we risk hurting a fellow person. I think that researchers should be more careful with animal studies, though. We should be sure that we have tested enough before moving up to highly intelligent animals like dogs and monkeys. Researchers shouldn’t be able to test in animals until they have shown that they have done their work on the lab bench to make sure these animals aren’t being tested unnecessarily. If Scientists do their leg work, more drugs may indeed be safer and higher level animals will not be negatively affected as much by drug side effects.

    • Photo: Joanne Davies

      Joanne Davies answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      I hate it that they test drugs on animals and wish they could find an alternative. 🙂

    • Photo: Martin Wallace

      Martin Wallace answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      This is a very tough question as I agree that it is not a very nice thing to do to test things on animals because it is possible that they suffer. Unfortunately in the world we live in now there is not much of an alternative.
      There are lots of drugs that are developed every year to cure all sorts of diseases and illnesses, which is a good thing, because we want to be able to make people better. The alternative to animal testing is to give the drugs straight to humans to see if it will work. I’m sure there isn’t anyone out there who would volunteer to be the first person to try out a new drug if they knew it hadn’t been tried before. Especially if you were ill.
      I’m not really sure how I feel about it, because if you were so ill that you might die, but there was a drug that could make you better I would really want to take it – If you knew that it had been tested on animals though, would you still take it? Remember the alternative is that you could die.

      It seems quite a selfish choice, and one that not many people are comfortable with.

      Paige is right in saying that animals shouldn’t be tested unnecessarily, and there is lots of work that can be done before giving any drugs to the animals. One thing I do think is that animals should not be used for testing cosmetic products. It’s one thing to put animals’ lives at risk for a life saving drug, another to test them so that people can look better.

    • Photo: Emily Bullen

      Emily Bullen answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      Well, I don’t like the idea that we need to do this of course, and would prefer to avoid it. However, we’re not good enough yet to have a good idea of how a drug will behave in humans without taking huge risks. Therefore the only way is to test things one step at a time: doing as much as we can using computers, then in small animals (rats/mice), then dogs once we understand a bit better, and finally humans.
      The testing is done in a very humane way, and any drugs stopped at the slightest signs of side effects, and the keepers know the animals very well, so I’m not unhappy with the way it’s done.
      We are always trying to get better at prediction, and we use fewer animals every year thanks to computers.

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