A leaflet appeared recently from the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) suggesting that the use of animals for toxicity testing is an ‘outdated’ science. This is actually a frequent claim by animal rights groups.
But is it a good argument? Have the antivivisectionists bothered to put any thought into this line of debate, or does it just trip off the tongue like so much else of what they say? After all, we still use wheels after thousands of years. So they can’t surely be suggesting that just because something has been in use for a long time it is automatically obsolete.
The only attempt at justification that BUAV makes is that we don’t still use some technologies from the past. The examples it gives are a typewriter, a large mobile phone, and a single-winged propeller plane. These are not great examples, since we still use aeroplanes, keyboards and small mobile phones.
The fact that these have changed over time reflects nicely the changes that we have seen in animal science over the same era. Animal studies are now far more precise and effective, and improvements in technology, in particular genetic modification, allow us to study the underlying basis of diseases in entirely new ways. If anything, the examples BUAV uses are testament to the achievements that can be gained by improving existing technology, rather than an indication that something is outdated just because it has been in use for a long time.
But perhaps the ‘outdated’ strand of antivivisection argument is even more heavily flawed for what it omits rather than what it includes. No mention is made of the fact that clinical and in vitro studies have likewise been used for many decades, if not centuries. In the 1800s, Lister did much of his work on bacterial sepsis in test tubes and with patients. Why do we not hear the antivivisectionists decry these methods as old-fashioned and outdated?
In fact we can identify only one part of this whole picture which is genuinely outdated, and that is the antivivisection mentality itself. It has scarcely changed in well over 100 years. Blind opposition to animal research regardless of the benefits, selective and distorted accounts of medical progress, and vastly exaggerated accounts of animal suffering should all be consigned to the waste heap. You wouldn’t go to animal rights groups if you wanted to develop better treatments for cancer. There is no reason why anyone should listen to their outdated and ill-informed accounts of the science either.
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