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Reminder: Try to be civil with your responses. I doubt that barging in here and preaching from your 1 inch high soap box will do any good if you belittle everyone's opinions for not being a part of yours. Thanks..

What is your opinion on experimentation with animals? Is it fair? Is it just? Or is is something that shouldn't be done and we should continue pursuing other methods in testing products and learning new techniques to save lives? I will not state my opinion on the issue yet because I want to observe what a few people have to say. All I will mention though is I took Pyschology and it showed pictures of rats with electrodes in their heads, shock therapies, and other horrific-looking methods to experimentation. But I also saw some decent experiments such as reward programs, harmless tests, and observations on learning -- all of which omit pain in any way, shape, or form. There are two sides to animal experimentation, and I wanted to make sure you all understood that.

There's the rat that gets shocked for going to the wrong part of a maze..

..and there's the rat that gets a big piece of cheese for hitting the circle three times.

Don't condemn experimentation to just one form.

Oh I agree with you... or how about testing pet food on animals.... its somewhat dumb.... not to mention cruel.

Thats upsetting to... but I am talking about like Iams giving dogs/cats gum diseases and other illnesses to see if their companies dog food will help in making the diseases/ilnesses better.

there's an animal testing facility by my house. they don't harm the animals at all, and they take good care of them. they try to find medicines that work for the animals. they take animals that are either already sick and test them with the medicine, or they take ones that need to be put to sleep for other reasons. i don't know about other places, but they are very kind to the animals there.

All of it depends. If they injure an animal over a product, no way.

I know nothing has been posted in this thread for a while but if you are looking for a good book to read about the ''perspective'' of an experiment animal read Plauge Dogs, by Richard Adams, it has the same perspective as Watership down.

Note: this is a difficult book if your not 'into' reading.

I wouldn't ask such a broad question. The idea of them putting a rat under a mild sleep for no pain as they insert many eletrical devices to monitor their brain patterns as they perform harmless tests seems oddly cruel, but that's it. They don't shock the rat, the animal doesn't feel the device under its skull, and it is well taken care of and monitored I bet to be recorded for audiences in Pyschology courses. Animal experimentation is wrong in the sense where there's pain, in my opinion, but is necessarily humane if there is just a treat/reward program or whatnot.

The original post said enough. There are tests where there's absolutely no drugging of the animals involved. There's an experiment, for example, where cats are being tested to see if they can see in color. They're put in front of two lights. When one lights green, they touch it to get a treat. If they touch red, they don't get a treat. The lights are random. The cats were proven to differentiate between the colors, and we learned something about them that didn't hurt them at all.

The drug testing and other medical things I don't agree with. The justification behind it is the idea that finding out about these things will prevent the deaths of human beings. At this point in medicine and science there aren't really ways to find this out through other methods. It's sad and wrong and I wish animals weren't subjected to it. I wish they'd pursue other ways to find out. It makes me feel weird to take my birth control pill after reading in the pamphlet that it was tested on rabbits, but I have to take it (for medical reasons, too. It was why I was initially put on it).

Spirit of Dragons, the reason animals wouldn't do it is because their minds are incapable of scientific pursuits and not because they are morally against it. Elevate their intelligence to the level of a person and I'm sure they would too. Science is founded on experimentation, and although it's grim to realise all of the beneficial technologies that help animals were probably founded upon animal testing. The solution to this is to move forward and find other ways. Were those species as capable of learning as us, they would have had to have gone through those stages as well.