Lab Animal Testing...To what extent is it truly necessary?

i think it's completely wrong to allow junior high/elementary school children start dissections so early. junior high kids rarely ever pursue the career path that they hope for in their early years.
i think kids who think that they are a bit interested in anatomy and such should be able to CHOOSE in high school whether to take a class that has dissections, etc. nothing wrong with that.

anyhow, what disgusts me the MOST is when people find it FUNNY when they dissect. i knnow of a lot of people who named and took pictures of a cat they dissected in anatomy. i mean, what the heck?! a lot of people started butchering brain parts of fetal pigs and cats when i dissected in high school too. it's disgusting. if we must cut open random animals, show a little respect, yea know?

thank you. i completely agree.

i think some products--medications and such--have to be tested on animals, unfortunately. actually, i think it's an extremely controversial point, and people will probably be disgusted with what i have to say on this subject, but why test medications on animals anyway?! they do NO harm to us, and their greatest fears are what humans have in store for them in torture chambers of cigna, johnson & johnson and such... why not test medications and products on humans? why not test it on people on death row? yeah, i know.. that may be a terrible statement.. cruel and unusual punishment. but hey, we're imposing CRUEL and unusual procedures on innocent animals who have done nothing wrong to us and deserve no punishment.

Why can we decide that animals are lesser beings and thus are suitable to be tortured in the name of smooth, silky hair?

We have a bar set where life is worthy of respect, and anything below that bar can be removed from its natural habitat, dismembered, tortured, and ripped to shreds for purposes as mundane as testing chemicals for shampoos. At one point some humans didn't make it over that bar. Today they do, but that doesn't mean that testing and vivisection are any less terrible then they were in the past. It just means that the victims can't talk back.

I too dissected a variety of animals in elementary school and middle school, and I wouldn't change that at all. In my opinion, the goal of elementary and junior high education (and, arguably, high school) is to introduce students to a variety of academic subjects so they have enough background experience to make an informed decision to pursue a particular career area in college. If I didn't have experience doing dissections, writing stories, studying foreign languages, etc. I would have been nowhere near as informed about the various subjects when it came time for me to make a life decision.

Furthermore, I think the idea of virtual dissections is complete crap. I know plenty of people who would have enjoyed clicking a mouse and watching the layers of a cat peel back for them. They might enjoy it so much that they decide to pursue biology at a later point in education - late enough in their education where they would get to dissect a real animal. I can only imagine how flabbergasted they would be having smelled formaldehyde and cutting through the various fleshes for the first time. They would probably puke all over the place, feel completely embarrassed, drop out of school, and be a whore like the people at that place fariz visited last week. I don't know about you, but I think that would definitely suck.

Sorry for the rant – but really, virtual dissections is a bad idea. How about instead of sending kids to Paris, Rome, London, etc. as part of their senior year trips in middle school and high school, we just put them in front of a computer and let them look at pictures so they don’t waste our precious resources flying across the globe destroying the planet. I’m sure they would appreciate walking on the same cobblestone pathways as Napoleon, would understand how many lives were lost in WWII as they look over the beaches of D-Day in Normandy, or share the sadness of visiting a concentration camp. Yep, I’m sure they would feel the smell of the ocean in Normandy or the fear of being locked in a concentration camp from pictures on a computer. Hell, I’m sure they would appreciate getting wasted in the Latin Quarter and pissing on some French guy’s front door as he yells at you from the third story window. Yep, let’s do virtual trips – nothing beats getting wasted in front of a computer looking at a picture of France and then being electrocuted as you piss all over the CPU.

I think there is a fine line between "necessary" and "unnecessary" lab animal testing. I recall reading that about 50-100 million vertebrate animals are used in the "name of science" yearly. Although I am not at all against the use of animals for the use in research, simultaneously I wonder how much of the possible 100 million deaths was actually necessary..this is where "necessary" vs "unnecessary" comes into play. I agree, for anything prior to high school (and even high school is questionable,) dissections are unnecessary. Instead, a harmless alternative is an available computer program where you digitally "dissect" an animal. The whole purpose of these dissections is to give students a better understanding of anatomy.. but there are so many other options accessible. On the contrary, some of the research I did during the time I was in high school (through an actual neurological institute, so it held some legitimacy) did involve the use of canines/felines. However, I felt like I was not doing harm because it was going towards finding a better treatment towards a brain tumor that affects humans and animals alike (in fact, ironically it held more of a threat to animals than it did humans.)

Ultimately I feel like regulations should be better altered to truly deem what is a gratuitous use of animals and what is not.. and when an alternative is available, it should be used instead.

I agree with your argument against killing animals unnecessarily, but I do not think grade school dissections fit in that category. My interest in optometry was sparked by a cow's eye dissection in fifth grade, and this interest would have been undoubtedly delayed (or perhaps nonexistant) otherwise. Yes, a lot of children are not interested in the dissections (or in any of their schoolwork for that matter), but for the ones who are, let's let them learn and see where the influence holds.

Actually, I'd like to comment on middle school/high school dissections in this post, because there is just Waaay to much to talk about pertaining to actually testing poor little lab rats for scientific purposes.

So, I dissected a cow heart in 6th grade. no joke. I dissected a whole array of reptiles and creepishly large insects in 7th grade. i also dissected a shark at some point in junior high. i also dissected fetal pigs, and i also watched some UCIrvine kids induce a heart attack on a cat they they bought from God knows where, and allowed my medical group to watch the students cut open the cat and show us how a heart attack affects the heart muscles and brain in a variety of ways.

I think this is pretty unnecessary. Why do we let these junior high school kids dissect animals at such a young age, especially if some kids aren't even interested in dissections. I think that we should wait until the kids are old enough and they are able to take a class that allows them to DECIDE if they want to learn about the anatomy of a cat, or something like that. It's completely unnecessary to kill some random animals for the purpose of education if it's not actually that important of a lesson for young kids to learn. I mean, most kids finally appreciate the significance of physiology once they are older and become more serious in their career prospects.