NEWS: Oxford Wins Exclusion Against Animal Protesters

CULTURE: Oxford Wins Exclusion Against Animal Protesters

There are alternatives to pouring perfume into bunny rabbits’ eyes to see at what point they go blind. And there are alternatives using cats to determine the LD50 of yet another boner pill. So, it’s understandable that animal rights activists would be upset. Oxford University, the future home of the Rage Virus, has been granted injunctions against animal rights activists from protesting at the university's new research lab.

I hate animal testing, and anyone with a heart will tell you that giving St. Bernard’s one-hundred straight shampoo enemas is horrific. And there are alternatives, in the 21st century, to dissecting yet another fucking pig fetus or frog. I also think that there are ways to humbly and rarely use animals for testing, but universities, high schools, and research labs use so many animals where computer models and simple common sense would have been sufficient.

What are you going to learn on the 1,124th vivsection that you didn't learn on the 1,123rd?

i agree. testing cosmetics and other consumer products on animals is cruel and completely unnecessary.

but when it comes to tests on animals for drugs that could possibly save a person's life, restore a blind person[s sight or a deaf person's hearing, i say thats worth the death of a thousand bunnies.

[Edited on May 26, 2006 11:17PM]

Maybe computer models would suffice for a high school biology lab, but doesn't the term research imply that not enough is known about the variables to build a good computer model.


[Edited on May 27, 2006 by ill_will]

Sadly, a lot of computer models, such as the differential equation based PBPK modelling are going to need population with data from animal experiments before they can be fully used.

That said, I did hear one of the protest groups' representatives make a really good point on the radio yesterday evening about this: he made the point that it was futile to pressure the people involved directly in the construction, and instead focus on what the facility was going to be used for, and how they can persude people to use it less. That seemed to make far more sense to me.

I'd really like to know how many animals are used in consumer product testing vs medical testing.

Hopefully these things will help:
Cells on a chip to cut animal tests

plus 1

To quote a rather infamous politician "I respectfully disagree."
Suffering is Suffering. Cruelty is Cruelty. Pain is Pain.

That and I know that there is no need for animal research in todays world. Medical research (at least in the US) has advanced beyond that. My friends that are physicians, my friends that worked for Pfizer are happy to confirm this as fact.

I am betting that Oxford isn't testing lipsticks here. If they are testing things that save lives, then I am all for it. Have you ever been innoculated? Taken antibiotics? Where do you think they test those things? Should diabetics give up their insulin because it was tested on a bunny rabbit?

Alright! Another victory for people who care more about human rights than fuckin' animals! Take that, PETA!

you too, sir, are an animal. you are .1% different from the chimpanzee that is being unnecessarily tortured. you're not too much different than that rat that has a human ear growing from it's head, either. so their rights are your rights. keep that in mind.

p.s. i bet you love some KFC, don't you?

[Edited on May 27, 2006 by LokisChild]

HAHAHAHAHA.


I think not. Biomedical research requires animal data. Knocking out genes to understand the function is in most cases... uninformative, in cell culture. And as far as doing things in silico... At this point, with notable exceptions (like targeted drug design based on X-ray crystal structures), it is just hand waving.

If you completely disapprove of animal testing/research, do me a favor. Stop taking any medications. Because they have ALL been tested on animals, and many were developed with animal model systems.

I don't think that number is correct, at least if you're talking genetically.

we have 99.9% of our DNA in common with apes. while .1% doesn't seem like a whole hell of a lot it's enough to cover the specific genes that are different between our evolutionary branches.


[Edited on May 27, 2006 by LokisChild]

So basically we need fatter, louder protesters, so the they can be seen and heard from farther away.

Maybe you have a differnt source. All the estimates I've seen range from about 94-99%. Either way, even a small percentage difference corresponds to a magnitude of 10million separate mutatations, so percentages are somewhat misleading.

it's completely possible that my source is wrong. since the man hated actually doing his job. (my bio prof.) that's the number he gave us to memorize. and while a small percentage can allow for a huge amount of differences, it helps give perspective to those who believe that they can separate themselves from animals. which is what i was trying to do.

Be that as it may, the issue here is the fact that protest and violence have become indistiguisable and that's why this injunction was necessary.

I agree in this case, it has. For people who are against animal testing full stop go sign up to be tested on for future treatments - both for animal and humans. Drugs that we use to cure our animals of even the simplest of problems (such as parasitic worms) had to be tested on animals.

I am against unnecessary cruelty to animals, and my ambition in life is to be a vet surgeon but that doesn't blinker me into thinking that ALL animal testing is wrong. Cosmetic and luxury items, I feel should be tested on the consumer not on an animal but medicinal substances for both humans and animals do need to be tested on animal models, this is research and needs to be done. If people were being tested on there would be uproar, just look at what happened in England at the start of the year when some volunteers testing a new drug became very very ill, a few were even in a coma.
Protesting something you feel to be wrong is noble and show that you care for something outside of yourself but this intimidation of employees, even those not involved in the testing is just as wrong and unlawful.
Everyone's opinion matters!!

Yes and your eye is made using the same genes as your toenails. Genes are not simply a blueprint, any given gene can give rise to growth of very different structures depending on how its information is expressed. Quoting statistics on shared genes is meaningless unless this behaviour is understood (which it isn't).

Exactly. Are people seriously against testing vetinary medecines on animals too?! That is the logical extension of the consent argument.

The problem with many of the more extreme anti-vivisectionists is that they are really single issue obsessives, blinded to reasoned debate, and prepared to ignore facts or inconsistencies that damage their cause. In the UK we've had bodies disinterred from graves, houses firebombed and people assaulted by anti-vivisectionists.

My girlfriend is trying to model angiogenesis in cancer. It is a *very* complicated problem, so much so that it is simple unfeasible to use traditional numerical/physics codes to achieve it because the computing power isn't available.
To put this in context, efficient physics codes that only deal with, say, a few 1000 identical particles, only interacting through gravity, for a few 10s of 1000s of time steps can take 6 months on the largest physics super-computers to run. To model biological systems you need to take account of as many particles/entities, sometimes more, interacting electromagnetically, and with changing chemistry feeding back. It is computationally gnarly. Anyone who suggests that we have currently have sufficiently sophisticated bio-codes to obtain new knowledge without animal testing is talking shit, and being intellectually dishonest to further a single issue that they have latched onto.

As a result she is developing a novel methodology for bio-modelling. But even so, to validate a model you need empirical data. That is the nature of research. Unfortunately, the life cycle of humans is so long that it isn't possible to obtain meaningful amounts of data from them, so animals must be used.

There are many people alive today (some of them close to me) that would not be if it weren't for the progress made in treating cancer that has come about as a direct result of research that uses animal testing. And thats just cancer, many people in the world never live long enough to get it.

3 million people die every year from malaria, and that number is set to increase. If anyone thinks that this terrible disease can be defeated without the use of animal testing they are living in cloud-cuckoo-land. But yeah, causing some bunnies/kittens to suffer is worse.

If Antibiotics etc are tested on animals who have different genetic makeup from humans then wouldn't testing on them prove insufficent due to the fact that a cat is a cat a dog is a dog and a human is human and so on? Wont different species react differently to different things therefore rendering animal testing for the good of the human race a bit pointless?

I have heard that contraceptive tablets intended for human consumption have the same affect on female Gorillas but that, to me seems rather profound in any case and no doubt true but where do you draw the line?

My god, you're right! I don't why medical researchers never thought of this. I guess a moments idle speculation is all that is really needed to solve complicated scientific problems after all.

The thing is, animal testing cannot demonstrate that a treatment is safe for humans, you still need to test on humans for safety. But animal models (technical term for animal testing) are spectacularly useful for checking if a treatment will even work on a given disease/pathogen etc. For example, a researcher has developed a vaccine/antibody/whatever that they think can prevent disease X. Before you get as far as testing how safe the drug is, you need to find out if it even does what you think it is going to do. So, first you need to administer it to a test patient, who you then infect with disease X to see if the vaccine/antibody/whatever succesfully prevents the disease. I would much rather that test patient were not human, because, if the drug doesn't work they are going to die.
There are many human diseases that affect other mammals, so this kind of research can be very useful indeed. You see, the point is that whilst the host creature may be different, the pathogen may not be, or may only be slightly different, so testing a treatment against it is valid. Basic toxicology can also be done as part of this stage of validation, but , where appropriate, it is followed by human testing.

Edited for clarity.

[Edited on May 27, 2006 by Dr_Astrobouy]

Maybe you learn that science earns it's claim to truth by repetition of experiment.

"common sense"? Science can never rely on common sense. You need data, not faith - and that's all common sense is, the faith that your limited experience are true.

To make new medications, you need to experiment on animals, because the next step after that is experimenting on people. And both animals AND people are going to fucking die in the process. Yes, that sucks, but without it, we'll get no new medicines.

And let's not pretend that this is about perfume and blush. It's a "20-million-pound ($37 million) biomedical center", not a Revlon factory. And these aren't people with signs, they're "Some animal rights extremists, opposed to vivisection, have widened the protest by threatening violence against anyone involved with the university." They are scum.

Your friends lie to you to avoid confrontation.