Should animals be used in medical laboratories even if it could lead to their death?
They have to be, and they have to die. They cost too much to house forever (the biggest cost of animal research is the cost per day to house and feed), and nobody’s going to adopt all those rats and mice when the experiments are done. Also, some important experiements involve death. Before testing drugs on humans, they’re tested on animals. Imagine a cancer drug, like Glivec, that’s turned out to help cure leukemias, and was first tested on proteins, then on cultured cells, then on mice, then on humans. People had to figure out if Glivec helped those mice survive cancers, before giving it to humans with cancer. This means experiments in which mice were given cancer, and treated with Glivec or with nothing. Someone had to measure whether the animals died less, or later, when they were treated with Glivec than when they were treated with control injections. It’s also important, in figuring out how safe a new drug is, to know how much of it is fatal. You wouldn’t want a pill that, if you
