Stop Product Testing On Animals

By FRANK LINGO

Over 25 million dogs, cats, monkeys and other animals are subjected to animal testing of drugs, cosmetics and more each year in this country, according to the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). Sometimes the animals die, most times they recover but are damaged from getting treated to toxins.

Is this practice necessary? The HSUS says that human cell-based testing and computer modeling are faster and more productive. Also, up to 95% of drugs tested on animals fail in human trials, according the National Institutes of Health.

A March 4, 2023 article in the Wall Street Journal revealed its callous attitude with the headline “The Supply Chain for Monkeys Is Broken.” So the paper’s concern is about commerce — a delivery problem — not exploiting sentient creatures.

The USA is number one in this ugly business. Yes, according to the WSJ article, we are the largest importer of macaques, an endangered monkey from Asia used for biomedical research. Poaching and smuggling are rampant and the price has gone up tenfold since the COVID pandemic began, just to feed the voracious need of researchers for these primates.

The federal government has been partly to blame. Until this year, the Food and Drug Administration mandated that medications and medical devices be tested on animals before being offered to humans, according to the University of Texas Medical Branch.

UTMB says it practices the Three Rs of medical research: Replace, Refine, Reduce. Replace means only use animals when there are no alternatives. Refine means design studies to minimize discomfort to animals. And Reduce means use the fewest animals possible.

While those seem like proper principles, it is past time to put this barbaric treatment of animals in the history books, like we’ve done with slavery. That FDA regulation wasn’t set in stone and in fact was recently reversed.

Wired.com ran an article on Jan. 11, 2023 headlined “The US Just Greenlit High-Tech Alternatives to Animal Testing.” The FDA Modernization Act 2.0 was signed by President Biden after passing Congress with bipartisan support. It ends a 1938 mandate that drugs must be tested on animals before they are used in human clinical trials. Some researchers will still use animal testing but whatever process is used, it will still be painstaking to get FDA approval.

The National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) is dedicated to ending the exploitation of animals used in science. NAVS states on their website that animal experiments do not predict results in humans and may be holding back research that could be done with humans and computer models. They note that the computer model can replicate 10 different human organs which could replace many areas of animal research.

It is just common sense that experiments on human subjects for human products is the right way to go. It can be done now with far less risk than in the past. Micro-dosing can give researchers guidance on what works and what doesn’t without putting the subjects’ lives in danger. There’s no shortage of willing participants, either. For example, when COVID hit, many thousands of volunteers offered themselves for testing.

The continuing controversy of animal testing exposes the problem of humans still acting superior. It is necessary to re-align our attitude about how we treat the other animals of the Earth. They have a right to life just as we do. When we treat all creatures with the love and respect we accord our pets, it will be a more humane world for all species.

Frank Lingo, based in Lawrence, Kansas, is a former columnist for the Kansas City Star and author of the novel “Earth Vote.” Email: lingofrank@gmail.com. See his website: Greenbeat.world

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2023

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