I googled researchsaves.org after seeing an ad on TV, and came across your blog. I appreciate the eloquence in your responses, and I couldn’t agree with you more.

-Axen

How many carcinogens do we dump into the world? I realize sometimes people just get cancer and all manner of other maladies, but sometimes the conditions we seek to solve through animal testing were of our own creation. Humans are inherently destructive to their environment and to each other.

Mainly, it comes down to the fact I don’t see anything particularly precious about humanity. Our brains process more information than a rat’s brain, or a monkey’s. That gives us the ability to kill them to save ourselves, but it doesn’t give the right to do so. Emotions, like conscious thought in general, are tricks of chemical interactions, and our desire to say we need to save ourselves at any cost is just a hallmark of our cultural vanity. If saving humans at the cost of other living creatures was an absolute moral necessity, then pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t be able to hold people’s lives and well-being for ransom after developing amazing life-saving drugs. Surely, if other life is nothing compared to human life, then money can’t even hold a candle?

All that being said, I don’t think you’ll see me anywhere in my posts advocating blowing up animal testing facilities, or running wild through a lab, killing the evil scientists and freeing the poor suffering creatures. I don’t think it’s the prettiest thing in the world, but telling people they should suffer or die in place of an animal is pretty stupid; mere self-preservation instincts will prevent anyone from agreeing with that idea. Absent the humans-must-be-saved factor, torturing and killing animals is a shitty thing, though, and I’m not going to give it my two thumbs up with accompanying shit-eating grin. However, the closest I come to advocating the abolishment of animal testing is suggesting that we should focus more efforts than we currently do on finding alternative means to achieve the same end result. Unfortunately, many people think that the leftover biological waste of a failed human IVF procedure is still more valuable than any other living creature.

If you’re so concerned about animal lives then you need to be out on the corner handing out condoms or throwing javelins in peoples crotches. Something like half a billion people suffer from needless diseases that could be vanquished with animal-tested technologies, but god yes please, let’s save the rats.