Do AR people accept that vivisection has led to valuable medical advances?
[PLANK A] AR advocates generally believe that vivisection has played a contributing, if not necessarily essential, role in some valuable medical advances. However, AR philosophy asserts that the end does not justify the means, and that therefore the answer cannot decide the legitimacy of the stance against vivisection. [PLANK C] That said, many people, including former vivisectors and medical historians, will readily state that there is ample scientific and historical evidence showing that most vivisection is futile, and often harmful to those it pretends to serve. On statistical grounds, vivisection does not deliver: despite the use of 144,000,000 animals in Britain since 1950, life-expectancy in Britain for the middle-aged has not changed since this date. Some 85 percent of the lab animals killed between the 1890s and the 1990s died after 1950, but the fall in death rate during these 100 years was 92 percent complete by 1950. Consider, for a specific example, these figures for cancer
PLANK A AR advocates generally believe that vivisection has played a contributing, if not necessarily essential, role in some valuable medical advances. However, AR philosophy asserts that the end does not justify the means, and that therefore the answer cannot decide the legitimacy of the stance against vivisection. PLANK C That said, many people, including former vivisectors and medical historians, will readily state that there is ample scientific and historical evidence showing that most vivisection is futile, and often harmful to those it pretends to serve.
