Medical Reasons

“It is a simple fact that many, if not most, of today’s modern medical miracles would not exist if experimental animals had not been available to medical scientists. It is equally a fact that, should we as a society decide the use of animal subjects is ethically unacceptable and therefore must be stopped, medical progress will slow to a snail’s pace. Such retardation will in itself have a huge ethical ‘price tag’ in terms of continued human and animal suffering from problems such as diabetes, cancer, degenerative cardiovascular diseases, and so forth.” 
What do you feel is more important - the life of your child or the life of a few rats? These comments are often brought up in animal rights debates. On the one side the animal rights campaigners, on the other side researchers intent on finding new medicines to improve the quality of human life. Animal activists claim that animal testing, or 'vivisection' is a scientific disaster and that thousands have been injured or killed as a result of it and time and time again researchers have been lead into a blind alley. Vivisection literally means, "cutting while still alive," but these days it refers to any experiments conducted on animals. According to the 1999 U.K. Vivisection statistics published by the government, 2.66 million animals were subjected to experiments 'likely to cause pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm' in the U.K. alone.