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gy66 replied to the topic Animals Used in Animal Testing in the forum Pre-clinical Device Development 6 years, 9 months ago
This is a very interesting point you bring up. I would personally love to live to see the day when we’ve developed technology that will eliminate the need for animal trials. To answer your question, I believe the line where we test certain animals is determined by a number of factors. Towards the top of that list I would say is the similarity between the animal and humans. Certain aspects of certain species highly resemble that of humans and are therefore highly favorable (e.g. pig skin) when it comes to conducting accurate experiments. The least we could do to minimize animal testing is use the animals that would provide sufficient data to end the trials as soon as possible and therefore choosing a species with aspects that share similar characteristics of a human would be more ethical than not. Another factor, I would say, would be the ability the given species has to withstand the proposed tests. I am certain that scientists would be discouraged from (and probably not permitted to) choosing an animal that would likely experience a great amount of harm or even death from the proposed experiment.
From the book The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique, authors Russell and Burch proposed the idea of the “Three R’s” to strive for a higher standard of animal-based scientific research. The three R’s represent Replacement (finding alternatives for animals in experiments), Reduction (using methods to maximize the amount of data used from each subject so that less animals are needed) and Refinement (methods used to eliminate or at least alleviate the distress that the subject will experience). In support of what I had mentioned, if “Replacement” cannot be achieved, doing whatever it takes to minimize the number of subjects needed, as well as the amount of pain inflicted, should be the main priority and the difficulty to meet these goals relies heavily on the type of animal chosen.
All in all, I find that the line where we draw the line is determined by the steps it takes to accomplish the goals of a trial without the use of an excessive number of subjects and without inflicting a great amount of pain.
