Lessons from COVID-19: Scientists Share 3 'Takeaway' Messages about Animal Testing and Hopes for a More Humane Future
An Alternatives to Animal Testing, Experimentation and Dissection Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM Lex Talamo, LadyFreethinker.org
October 2021

Here we highlight three key takeaway lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic: animal tests inherently are cruel, costly, and unsafe. Humanity could be better served by shifting to safer, more humane and more cost-effective human biology-based methods.

dead lab Rabbit
A dead rabbit lies on the floor in view of hutches full of live rabbits, after being used for drug testing. (Photo Credit: We Animals Media)

Hundreds of thousands of animals are tortured and killed in the United States each year in cruel and unreliable animal tests.

Some of the cats, dogs, guinea pigs, hamsters, monkeys, rabbits, pigs, rats, mice, and sheep endure multiple experiments, being “recycled” from one study to the next. Others — including all animals infected during disease trials — are killed at the end of the experiments.

The United States used and killed more than 797,500 animals in research experiments in 2019 alone, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS).

That massive number does not include rats and mice, who are not protected under the Animal Welfare Act, a federal law that establishes only minimal protections for animals used in labs who often endure painful procedures — including being burned, shocked, poisoned, mutilated, or brain damaged — without anesthesia.

The cruel animal testing is required for all new medical treatments by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), via provisions established in 1938 that necessitate tests on at least two species: one rodent species, and one non-rodent species.

Those provisions remain in place despite decades of evidence highlighting key genetic differences between humans and other species: the reason that more than 90 percent of all drugs approved in animal tests fail once they hit human clinical trials, and why only 6 percent of vaccines make it to human markets.

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