A cancer patient contemplates the value and suffering of laboratory animals used for medical and scientific research …
“The 75,000 monkeys currently held in laboratories just in the United States likely know the feeling of vulnerability… Years ago, I spent 14 months observing baboons in Kenya, who roamed free over the savannah of Amboseli National Park, moving in groups anchored by matrilines, or groups of related females. Their lives in no way mirror those of experimental laboratory monkeys…
Four baboons lived in the laboratory of the researcher Bruno Reichart in Munich, Germany, who said this to Scientific American magazine in 2018: ‘They can hop around, eat, drink, and they are enjoying life. They watch TV – their favourite is the cartoon with the chipmunk.’
The baboons, it turns out, did these things after hearts from genetically engineered pigs had been sewn into their chests. The idea is that, eventually, pigs’ hearts will help humans in need of cardiac transplants. All four monkeys were killed, one pair at 90 days following surgery, the second pair 90 days after that. From my years of research into animal cognition and emotion, I have no doubt that these baboons had wished to live – and that the ‘donor’ pigs had wished not to become vehicles for harvesting organs.
I am moved, too, by a rhesus macaque called Cornelius held since 2010 at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center (WNPRC) at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Had Cornelius been born in the wild, he would have grown up surrounded by his mother and aunts, nursing and cuddling and playing and exploring his world. At puberty, he would have transferred to another group to make his way into adulthood. At the WNPRC, where more than 1,800 other monkeys are also confined in laboratories, Cornelius has experienced nothing like this, nothing remotely natural for his species…
In image after image of Cornelius taken over months, he is alone in a cage. His posture is one of a depressed and withdrawn animal. He has been treated by lab researchers for frequent diarrhoea and for hair-pulling, which I recognise as signs of stress. At the WNPRC, Cornelius simply has no chance to be a monkey, and to live a life where his body and his mind are his own.
I wouldn’t find these monkeys’ suffering to be ethically acceptable even if it could be shown that it somehow contributes to improving human health. But the chances are slim that it does. In a 2014 paper in the BMJ, the medical sociologist Pandora Pound and the epidemiologist Michael B Bracken conclude that ‘even the most promising findings from animal research often fail in human trials and are rarely adopted into clinical practice.’ The following year, the neurologist Aysha Akhtar pointed out that, back in 2004, some 92 per cent of drugs passing preclinical tests, including those tested on animals, failed to reach market. And the failure rate had actually increased to nearly 96 per cent by 2015. These failure rates hold back good science, science that’s urgently needed…Most animal testing today doesn’t help human patients…”
Read more HERE
FIREPAW, Inc. 