Question: whats your take on animal testing? do you think its wrong or right?

Sofia Franco answered on 21 Nov 2013:

Well…that is a tricky one! I am against it by principle, because some things are beyond cruelty (and we are not just talking about rats and monkeys in this tests…which is already bad enough!), and the things that are tested can be really awful, from infecting animals with serious diseases or inducing others (like tumors), to amputating them or making them live in horrible conditions…all of this is awful, no doubt! And there should be limits put to what can be done or not, though at this point much is not regulated/checked so there is really no control on what is being done! On the other hand, things as medicine could have never evolved so far if it wasn’t for animal testing. Many products have to pass a phase of animal trials, before humane trials to test how safe they are. How could we do it otherwise? This is the big problem! And to be honest, I am not sure what can be a viable alternative…also, all the experiments scientists do in the labs, many involve animals to some extent, and though they might not be as shocking as the others, it is still animal testing, isn’t it? So where do we draw the line on what is acceptable or not? My take on it is that we need to be careful being extreme in our positions, as much passionate as we might be, as there are always to sides to each story…… banishing it would possibly just open up a new set of problems, creating an ever darker market and opening the doors to uncontrolled human testing…at this point I think the best that could be done was to heavily regulate the field and decide on what is acceptable or not (and if not, finding alternatives) and controlling it, to check if things are done accordingly!