“We have this this sort of human exceptionalism or human supremacy that that is used as the kind of baseline foundational justification for exploiting animals, that humans are just more important and we're more special in some way.” – Dr. Syd Johnson

 

 

Dr. Hope Ferdowsian and Dr. Syd Johnson  recently published an essay in the Hastings Center Bioethics Forum called, Primates and Medical Research A Matter of Convenience, Not Sound Science. I read the essay and quickly realized how much there was that I didn’t know about animal testing and research (and I thought I knew a lot).

 

The essay begins with one rhesus macaque who will spend her life in a cage as part of an Alzheimer's disease experiment. They tell the story not only of this individual primate, but of animal research as whole, how and when it started all the way up to where we are now, and also what an enormous failure most of it has been.

 

Around 90 percent of drugs that pass in animal testing fail on humans. With numbers like that, in any other industry I’m pretty sure that we’d have given up by now. Not only is animal testing insanely cruel, but it's incredibly ineffective.  So, why are we still testing on tens of millions of animals and spending billions of dollars on mostly bad research year after year? Money and because we’ve “always done it this way,” (and we have, since 6 BCE).

 

All systems that exploit, torture and abuse animals desperately need to change and the thing is, all of these systems can change. We have solutions. They exist and are getting bigger and better by the day. There are solutions to replace animals in the food system, in fashion, in entertainment and in medical research.

 

But the money train that goes into using animals in research isn’t slowing down, and not enough of us are demanding otherwise (and we are who is paying for it). I think in part, because not enough of us are aware of the cruelty and the inefficiency that is animal testing. We are paying the bill simply because this is how it’s always been done.

 

But it’s not how it should be done.