YJA Convention 1996 07 San Francisco CA Second

Author(s): Young Jains of America (YJA)
Publisher: Young Jains of America YJA USA

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ANIMAL USE IN TESTING AND RESEARCH
By: Rae Sikora
Many people hold assumptions about the validity or importance of animal experiments (including vivisection). People feel that they are somehow necessary to maintain or improve our standard of living. The practice of animal experimentation is a controversial subject that raises both ethical and scientific concerns. If you are uncertain about how you feel about animal experimentation, it is important that you learn as much as you can before you decide where you stand. Many health and scientific professionals are questioning the use of animals in experimentation and are taking a stand against animals methods, which they see as a wasteful and unscientific approach to improving our health.
The issues discussed in this session fall into the following basic categories:
I.
II.
Ethical issues
Scientific issues
A.
B.
C.
D.
Reliability of animal experimentation
Most effective use of time, energy, and financial resources
Ethical Issues:
Vivisection: necessary for our health?
Alternatives to animal experimentation in product testing, medical testing, and medical and scientific education
1.
2.
These issues and more will be discussed in this workshop. Workshop participants will view segments of the videos: Unnecessary Fuss and Inside BIOSEARCH. There will be time for questions and discussion, and a wide variety of materials will be available for anyone seeking more information on this topic.
Prevention
Humane alternatives (in-vitro, epidemiology, clinical, computer models)
The Center for Compassionate Living will make literature on this topic, from groups such as Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and Medical Research Modernization Committee, available to all Convention attendees.
The ethical issue comes down to this: do we have the right to burn, shock, cut open, poison, irradiate and kill animals even if doing so could help us? What if we could take one person away from his or her family, cage him or her, perform painful experiments and then kill him or her? Would this be ethical even if it saved everyone else in the room? What is the essential difference between a chimpanzee and a human that justifies experiments on chimps that are illegal on people? Does the Animal Welfare Act really ensure that animals will be treated humanely in labs? In this workshop, the ethical issues will be discussed briefly and then we will go on to look at the very complex and scientific issues.
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