On Oct 8, 8:51*am, dh@. wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Oct 2008 11:38:56 -0700 (PDT), Toilet Peppermintman > wrote:
> >On Oct 7, 11:46*pm, dh@. wrote:
>
> > The animals are not being cheated out of any part
> >of their life by being raised for food, but instead they are
> >experiencing whatever life they get as a result of it.
>
> >Correct. Inadequacy of the government to provide proper education for
> >live stocks/animals
> >causes this emptiness they are feeling.
>
> * * No. They learn all they care about learning, and maybe more.

As a capstone, it appears that a short lesson on Animal
Experimentation is needed as well. Please pay close attention:


Does animal experimentation save human lives?

More lives could be saved and suffering stopped by educating people on
the importance of avoiding fat and cholesterol, the dangers of
smoking, reducing alcohol and other drug consumption, exercising
regularly, and cleaning up the environment than by all the animal
tests in the world.

And, as George Bernard Shaw once said, "You do not settle whether an
experiment is justified or not by merely showing that it is of some
use. The distinction is not between useful and useless experiments,
but between barbarous and civilized behavior." There are some medical
problems that can probably only be cured by testing on unwilling
people, but we don’t do it because we recognize that it would be
wrong. We need to extend this same concern to other living, feeling
beings, regardless of what species they may be.


Hasn’t every major medical advance been attributable to experiments on
animals?

Medical historians have shown that improved nutrition, sanitation, and
other behavioral and environmental factors—not anything learned from
animal experiments—are responsible for the decline in deaths since
1900 from the most common infectious diseases and that medicine has
had little to do with increased life expectancy. Many of the most
important advances in health are attributable to human studies,
including the development of anesthesia; bacteriology; germ theory;
the stethoscope; morphine; radium; penicillin; artificial respiration;
antiseptics; the CAT, MRI, and PET scans; the discovery of the
relationships between cholesterol and heart disease and between
smoking and cancer; the development of x-rays; and the isolation of
the virus that causes AIDS. Animal testing played no role in these and
many other developments.

The role of animal studies in the development of many treatments has
been exaggerated and twisted to fit the goals of those who promote
animal experimentation. For example, the development of the polio
vaccine involved two separate bodies of work—the in vitro or non-
animal studies, which were awarded the Nobel Prize, and the subsequent
animal experiments in which close to 1 million animals were killed and
which the Nobel committee refused to recognize as anything more than
wasteful. Early polio studies on animals misled researchers about the
route of infection and delayed the development of a vaccine for
decades.

It’s impossible to say where we would be today if we had refused to
experiment on animals, because throughout medical history, very few
resources have been devoted to non-animal research methods. We do know
that animal experiments frequently give misleading results and many
believe we’d probably be better off if we hadn’t relied on them and
ignored avenues of research more relevant to humans, including
epidemiological and cell research.


If we didn’t test on animals, how would we conduct medical research?

Human clinical and epidemiological studies, cadavers, and computer
simulators are faster, more reliable, less expensive, and more humane
than animal tests. Ingenious scientists have developed a model
"microbrain" from human brain cells to study tumors, as well as
artificial skin and bone marrow. We can now test for skin irritancy on
cells in a test tube, produce vaccines from human cell cultures, and
perform pregnancy tests using blood samples instead of killing
rabbits. Says Gordon Baxter, cofounder of Pharmagene Laboratories, a
drug research company that uses only human tissues and computers to
develop and test drugs, "If you have information on human genes,
what’s the point of going back to animals?"


Should we throw out all the drugs that were developed and tested on
animals?

Unfortunately, many things in our society came about through others’
exploitation. For instance, many of the roads we drive on were built
by slaves. We can’t change the past; those who have already suffered
and died are lost. What we can do is change the future by using non-
animal research methods from now on.


Would you approve an experiment that would sacrifice 10 animals to
save 10,000 people?

Suppose the only way to save those 10,000 people was to experiment on
one mentally challenged orphan. If saving people is the goal, wouldn’t
that be worth it? Most people will agree that it is wrong to sacrifice
one human for the "greater good" of others because it would violate
that individual’s rights. There is no logical reason to deny animals
the same rights that protect individual humans from being sacrificed
for the common good.