Response to "My Monkey" and "Monkey business" letters

This is a response to an article on nonhuman primate testing in the Isthmus weekly and the follow-up letters in this week's issue, all but one of which were extremely anti-animal testing.

Animal rights groups like to portray scientists as sadists torturing large numbers of animals. This is a pretty stupid accusation if you know anything about how animal testing really works, because a) the damn things are expensive. People buy pet store mice for less than a buck. If you had to pay $40 for a mouse, you would treat it very nicely, and you also wouldn't go out and buy several dozen of them unless you had a very good reason. Primates cost THOUSANDS. b) You get better data out of a group of healthy, happy animals than a group of animals where some are OK and some are sick or hurt. If - if - all of the stuff that the guy wrote in that article was true, the monkeys get worse treatment than our mice.

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Dear Editors,

“We shouldn't test drugs on monkeys because 92% of drugs that pass nonhuman primate studies fail in clinical trials" is specious because the occurrence of adverse side effects that can be allowed for a human drug is so extremely low. Human clinical trials involve dozens, hundreds, then thousands of people. If for instance 0.5% of them have heart attacks, this is unacceptable but wouldn't have been detected in a study of a dozen monkeys, even when the drug has the same effect on monkeys as humans.

The only alternative would be to take drugs only tested in vitro or in mice and put them straight into humans, which I don't think would be acceptable to anyone. Of course there are some alternative medicine fans who believe that most of modern medicine is a conspiracy, but the vast majority of people reading this will have benefited from modern drugs and other therapies at some point in their lives, and all of these have been tested in animal models.

Yes, a monkey is not the same as a human, nor is a mouse. But with our existing technology, no amount of testing in vitro can replicate the fantastic complexity of a live creature, so they're the best we've got. Scientists are not sadists out to torture the maximum number of animals. We are workers with limited budgets to keep expensive animals, and humans with hearts. "Reduce, refine, and replace" is in
everyone's interest, but replacement is not always possible.

Sincerely,

I noticed that Rick Bogle (founder of the Primate Freedom Project) used the word "vivisectors" in his letter. "Vivisection" harks back to the days when people would tie up and cut up screaming animals without anaesthesia because many people believed that animals weren't actually capable of feeling pain. Nobody believes that any more, and any good IACUC (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee) will reject out of hand a protocol that includes severely painful procedures - basically, anything worse than a blood sample or an injection - without anaesthesia. Even leaving aside that many people go into biology because we like animals, putting an animal under that much suffering would give you screwy results from the stress.

I strongly recommend reading CS Lewis' essay "On Vivisection" especially if you're Christian. I think this is the full version, many of the other versions floating around the Internet been selectively chopped up and censored. He writes about the tremendous sense of awe and responsibility which a Christian researches owes to God's creatures on whom he or she is inflicting pain. (He uses "trembling awe" but I certainly don't want to be trembling when I give a little baby chick an intravenous injection.)

"Reduce, refine, replace"; scientific reasons for minimizing pain and stress; the divine mandate to take care of Creation. Because of the world we live in, we have to keep using animals, but keeping all these things in mind.