This is why animal research continue.
- Vested interests: the animal breeders, the manufacturers of cages, restraining devices animal feed and surgical instruments.
- Animal 'testing' provides legal defence for drug manufacturers in court when suits for damages are instituted after adverse effects can no longer be ignored. The company can always claim in its defence that "all the required tests had been done, leaving the victims without adequate compensation.
- Researchers receive funding by way of grants, running into billions of pounds, obtained from taxpayers and fundraising campaigns.
- Many scientists base their entire careers on animal experiments.
- Animal research is convenient and flexible -- it can be used to prove almost anything. All you have to do is select the appropriate species. For example, depending on who funds the research, It can be 'proved' that cigarettes cause cancer, or do not cause cancer:
"...there are endless possibilities for producing irrefutable evidence in support of any theory through the use of various animal species.
-- Prof. Pietro Croce, MD, Hon. President, Doctors in Britain Against Animal Experiments; Author of Vivisection or Science.
Animal-based research delays and hampers advances in medicine. Real advances have come from clinical, epidemiological (population) and post mortem studies. For instance. corneal transplants were delayed for nearly 90 years because of the results of animal studies, the breakthrough coming from clinical work. Where animal-based medicine has been helpful, this is despite animal experiments and not because of them, their safety only having been 'proved' through use in humans.
The Way Forward
Truly scientific methods of biological and medical research already exist: epidemiology, computers for the construction of mathematical models, cell and tissue cultures in vitro and many others "which awaken a new hope: the hope that biomedical research may already be on the way to a radical renewal." Prof. Pietro Croce, MD.We need to pay more attention to: social conditions, malnutrition, unemployment, poverty, pollution, diet, health education, complementary medicine -- homeopathy, acupuncture and other forms of healing.
There is a growing movement, world-wide, of thousands of doctors, scientists, nurses, disabled and millions of other people working to end this unscientific method of medical research. "Freed from the error of vivisection, future researchers will be able to base medical research on a genuinely scientific foundation ... gradually restoring to medicine that scientific quality that is today usurped by vivisectionist error."
-- Prof. Pietro Croce MD, Vivisection or Science
