We don't agree on this. Whether it's OK to test on animals is an opinion. I don't think it's OK. You do. Great.
But it is torture. Torture isn't about the intention of the person inflicting the pain, it's about the outcome on the victim. If a procedure causes extreme pain and distress to a conscious being, then it's torture for them.
You wouldn't say that for example, Mengele didn't torture his "subjects" because his main intention was to find out medical discoveries rather than to specifically inflict pain. The pain was inflicted, and he didn't care that his subjects suffered enormously. In fact sometimes the pain and distress suffered by Mengele's victims was one of the outcomes he was testing for, just like the pain and distress of some animals in animal testing is an outcome that the researchers are looking to measure. "For the greater good", of course, but I don't think that's a good excuse.
And by the way, just because there are many medications today that sit on the back of animal testing, doesn't mean I have to support animal testing going forward.
To argue that I have to throw away any achievements based on cruel and inhumane practices, would equally require us to stop using any technology or practice developed in an inhumane way. For example we all agree that slavery is wrong now, correct? And yet so much of our civilisation is based on ideas developed by slave owners, even our modern day computers and smartphones are developed in conditions that involve terrible working conditions and sometimes even slavery.
Does this mean unless you become a Luddite you can't be opposed to slavery moving forward? Of course not. This argument has no merit in my eyes.
I don't believe that medication needs to be tested on animals in the modern day because of several reasons:
1. We already know what all natural chemicals do to cells, because we've found it out already. So we don't need to test whether a chemical is toxic to cells on an animal first, because we already know what is toxic. Unless you've created some unholy new chemical that never existed before, in which case see #2.
2. For complex combinations of chemicals we can test on human cells in a lab, because we can clone human organs and cells easily now.
3. We also have found that animal testing on mice etc very frequently doesn't apply to humans because shockingly, humans and mice are very different. So human testing always needs to be done anyway. The reason we do animal testing first is because it's cheap, and animals reproduce quickly. In my view that's not a good enough excuse to torture animals. There are thousands to millions of terminally ill people who would jump at the chance to be part of lifesaving medical research that has a chance of curing them. The only thing is it's less convenient, and animal suffering is considered less valuable than the convenience and bottom line of pharma researchers.
4. Most animal testing is actually cosmetic, and there is absolutely no reason to do cosmetic testing on animals (ie forcibly putting huge amounts of shampoo into the eyes of a forcibly restrained rabbit to test at what point it will go blind). Use common sense, and don't use toxic chemicals in your cosmetics, and pay humans to test it, after all they will be the ones wearing the cosmetics.
However just because I oppose animal testing now, for future tests, doesn't mean that I will not use medication that was developed with animal testing if my life depended on it. That would mean not only did these animals suffer and die, but they died for nothing.
