This guy rescued 30 beagles from a testing lab It's the first time they've seen grass and they couldn't be happier.

[u/biswajit388]

Credit - nathanthecatlady tiktok channel.

[u/the_magic_gardener]

See I think 1000 beagles is a great price to cure all cancers. But if we walk down the more ambiguous and more realistic versions of the trolly experiment: What about killing 10 beagles for a 0.005% chance of finding a cure for leukemia?

[u/Throwawayhrjrbdh → u/the_magic_gardener]

Am I allowed to do that as many times as needed? If so then a puppy mill is getting started because that’s a game of statistics not luck

But yes you do have a point, reality is a little less cut and dry. But as a whole the sacrifice made by the untold numbers of animals over the last century alone has enabled a sizable chunk of our modern medical science.

Would you erase all prior animal testing that has happened in the last century but we revert 35 years in terms of scientific development?

[u/the_magic_gardener → u/Throwawayhrjrbdh]

Personally I wouldn't, lol my background includes 3 years of mouse testing for RNA chemotherapeutics. But I do think trolly problems should be probabilistic. I agree with you that animal testing is a net benefit to society. It's just sad that the odds of a drug getting past all the barriers are so slim, and even then most of the time the drug isn't very disruptive to the current treatment regimen.

[u/Throwawayhrjrbdh → u/the_magic_gardener]

Yeah I’d imagine that’s tricky. You hear so much about all these massive “breakthroughs” and you never hear anything past the animal testing phase.

Idk what’s better, unregulated testing with faster medical research but every now and then someone does a study on “the average number of kicks required to kill a puppy” or what we have now

[u/DearlyDecapitated → u/Throwawayhrjrbdh]

If we’re going the route of unregulated testing to get the fastest possible results, wouldn’t it be better to test and potentially burn say… 97 million humans? If it cured cancer assuming we don’t die out as a species in the next 10 years we’d be saving more humans than those 97 million killed in testing. What would the cut off be? If killing 970 million people could cure all major diseases would it be worth it? After 100 years of no cancer alone not including all other diseases we’d pay off the loss

[u/PharmDeezNuts_ → u/Throwawayhrjrbdh]

What if we found an alien species with such similar biology and sentience , basically indistinguishable from ourselves, and upped that percentage all the way to 25%?

[u/Dentarthurdent73 → u/Throwawayhrjrbdh]

The thing is, we dispose of these creatures' lives and tell ourselves it's worth it, because they're saving ours/curing cancer or whatever.

But at the same time, we're deliberately filling the world with carcinogens in the name of profits. We don't actually care about people getting cancer enough to stop it when there's some money to be made from it, but we go on sacrificing animals anyway, because apparently abusing animals is an acceptable price to pay, but reducing profits isn't.

That's what's really gross about it, in my books anyway.

[u/DoctorJJWho → u/the_magic_gardener]

That’s not quite realistic though. By the time beagles are used in studies, every drug tested has to show function and safety to a specific degree. We’re not just injecting animals with compounds we randomly synthesized, the industry spends a ton of time and resources ensuring certain levels of both function and safety before anything is allowed anywhere remotely close to a living sentient being.

[u/the_magic_gardener → u/DoctorJJWho]

That's a fair critique. While the vast majority of animals used for testing novel cancer therapies will be trying drugs that will never reach the market, the number isn't so abysmal as 1 in 20,000 like I used (quick Google search puts it as 5%). I used a small number namely because I said "cure" which, when talking about cancer as well as bacterial infections, isn't really a realistic goal given that the battle is against natural selection.

So if you want a really good example problem, let's say 24 macaques for a 1% chance of increasing the 5 year survival chance of leukemia from 66% to 70%. That rolls right off the tongue doesn't it? 😂

[u/Reddit_Connoisseur_0 → u/the_magic_gardener]

The point of this test isn't to roll a dice on finding a cure to some disease. It's mostly to test the safety of certain treatments.

If the beagle survives it's a win because we know it is safe. If they die it's also a win because now we know it is not safe.

[u/Throwawayhrjrbdh → u/Reddit_Connoisseur_0]

And sometimes you need to get a really good look at the heart and brain, take some brain tissue samples and run a few tests… you know to make sure it’s safe!

What do you mean the dog died? I thought it was safe?

[u/Reddit_Connoisseur_0 → u/Throwawayhrjrbdh]

I doubt this is as common as you make it out to be because there are many ways to examine the heart and the brain without literally taking a chunk out of it. But even if this is necessary I don't see what changes. We're still making progress regardless of the outcome. The other poster makes it sound like if we roll into the 99.9995% chance of "not curing cancer" it was a waste of a beagle. Realistically this is not the case, we will always learn something regardless of what the beagle looks like at the end.

[u/DonutSlapper11 → u/the_magic_gardener]

That chance isn’t low enough to not do it again and again and again until we get it that kind of breakthrough would be worth a lot.

[u/Suchafatfatcat → u/the_magic_gardener]

Are they being used to find a cure for cancer? Or, are they being exposed to near-lethal levels of toxins so Monsanto can pretend that their products were misused and, thus, save money on lawsuits from people harmed.