Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Mad Science

The killing of animals in the name of science and medicine marches on

Every year around the world, millions upon millions of animals are cut open with knives and saw blades, burned by flames and radiation, deliberately injected and infected with deadly viruses, shocked with high-voltage electricity, operated on unnecessarily without anesthesia, and tormented in countless other ways. Usually, the unimaginable pain suffered by these involuntary victims ends only when they die, alone and frightened.

These mutilations and dismemberments are not being performed by criminal psychopaths hiding out in secret dungeon basements. Rather, they are conducted by highly-educated technicians in modernized research and testing laboratories, most of which are funded or subsidized by taxpayers. In the name of science and medicine, a multinational, multi-billion dollar industry uses animals’ bodies like mere lab equipment for everything from searching for cures to diseases that afflict humans to testing the effectiveness of a new eye liner.

What we learn from torturing and killing animals in medical “research” and “scientific” experiments tells us little or nothing about healing people, but it reveals much about the human species’ arrested evolutionary development. Real progress would be marked by the abolition of animal experimentation, and the introduction of compassion as the guiding principle in our search for truth.