strongvoicesforward said:
Well, it appears Tokis-Phoenix does not have the courtesy to reciprocate answering "if" questions, and like Rock-Lee says does go off on assumptions.
What "if" questions that were clearly defined have i not answered? Plus you don't have to keep repeating that (in bold) when i'm not even logged on- and you accused me of posting when you couldn't reply
strongvoicesforward said:
In the post above she makes the statements:
Legislation, while good and can be a protector of abuse, is not a guarantee of protection. Show us some government study that says ALL lab animals are protected from cruelty and mistreatment. What does that mean? Are you saying there is no animal suffering in labs in England simply because some legislation is on the books purporting to protect animals?
I know there is anti discrimination legislation in the U.S., but it still happens.
Don`t get me wrong. I am not bashing England. England is the hot bed of strong animal rightists and direct action for animals is a great export they have been successful in spreading throughout Europe and to the U.S.
Another assumption.
Maybe it cruelty does happen in labs, but thats just an assumption. For now, England has some of the best and most rigorously kept laws against animal cruelty in the world.
Saying it cruelty
might go on, and thats a reason to put a stop to animal testing, is like saying there are people in this country who have badly treated their pet dogs amoungst the many thousands of good dog owners, and thus we must put a stop to the keeping of dogs just in case somone mistreats them.
strongvoicesforward said:
As for the link you provided above -- that is just a list of pro-reasons for the argument for animal testing. It is not factual. Anyone can make a list and the antithesis exists which could be cited as fact, too -- although to do so would be erronious also. Or, are you assuming again that lists you cite on a BBC site are just factual information?
Show us a study Tokis-Phoenix that supports your point and not just a list of reasons for pro-animal testing.
It is factual- there are laws against animal cruelty in England, we have found many cures for deseases/illnesses, animal testing has helped us come along in strides in surgery etc- if you cannot face the facts, then deal with it.
Oh, and by the way, it is a study. Why don't you show me an accurate and up to date study that says otherwise?
strongvoicesforward said:
Would I exchange my life for an animal`s life where the outcome was a sure thing -- I die and it lives? No.
Would I willingly risk my life for an animal? Yes.
Ah, so, i wasn't wrong in assuming that you would not give your life to save the lives of animals (would you do it for a 100 monkeys, heh?).
strongvoicesforward said:
In fact many animal rightists/liberationists who engage in direct action do so. To raid an animal breeding farm that supplies animals to labs is risking serious injury when suppliers employ razor wire that needs to be scaled or when a farmer has loaded weapons in their homes. Anytime a liberationist is caught by police or private security that has weapons, they are at serious risk to bodily injury that could result in death.
I certainly wouldn't call climbing over a barb wire fence "risking your life"- i've been doing it since i was a little kid and the worst thing that ever happened to me was a torn sleeve on my jumper.
And if you break into somone's property, wether its somones home or workplace, and they have a right to protect themselves from tresspassers, you are breaking the law and to be honest, they have every right IMHO to shoot you if you break into their home and scare the hell out of them.
No farmer will murder or injure somone just taking a stroll on their land unless they are inflicting serious damage to their property or refusing to go or brandishing weapons themselves.
You might try to romantasize the fact you support criminal activities, and you believe you are honestly risking your life, but really when you break into other peoples properties illegally or steal or threaten/injure people, you are just a common criminal and deserve to be behind bars. You give a bad name to your cause.
Oh yes, and the cancer thing- well i think its really ironic that the guys very own life was saved via cancer treatments when he would have died for sure otherwise without them.
People are getting cancer more and more now days, but we are not losing the war so to speak on cancer itself as we have come along in strides in medical treatments and research, yes the survival rates for somone in advanced cases of cancer are pretty much the same, but treating and curing cancer on people, the survival rates have gone up a lot. The guy who wrote the article would not have even survived if it wern't for those treatments developed since the 70's.
strongvoicesforward said:
A mouse gene may be very similar to a human gene, but the rest of the mouse is very different.
The fact that so many cancer researchers seem to forget or ignore this observation when working with "mouse models" in the lab clearly irks Robert Weinberg. A professor of biology at MIT and winner of the National Medal of Science for his discovery of both the first human oncogene and the first tumor-suppressor gene, ...
... preclinical models," Weinberg explains. "And it's been well known for more than a decade, maybe two decades, that many of these preclinical human cancer models have very little predictive power in terms of how actual human beings?\actual human tumors inside patients?\will respond.
...tumors that arise in each, with the same flip of a genetic switch, are vastly different.
"And to be sure, cancer is a challenge like no other. The reason is that this killer has a truly uncanny ability to change its identity. "The hallmark of a cancer cell is its genetic instability," says Isaiah "Josh" Fidler, professor and chair of the department of cancer biology at Houston's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. The cell's DNA is not fixed the way a normal cell's is. A normal cell passes on pristine copies of its three-billion-letter code to every next-generation cell. But when a cancer cell divides, it may pass along to its daughters an altered copy of its DNA instructions?\and even the slightest change can have giant effects on cell behavior. The consequence, says Fidler, is that while cancer is thought to begin with a single cell that has mutated, the tumors eventually formed are made up of countless cellular cousins, with a variety of quirky traits, living side by side. "That heterogeneity of tumors is the major, major obstacle to easy therapy," he says.
Harold Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, agrees. "I just think this is a very tough set of problems," says Varmus, who has seen those problems from more angles than just about anybody. He shared a Nobel Prize for discovering the first oncogene (a normal gene that when mutated can cause cancer) in 1976. That crucial finding, five years into the War on Cancer, helped establish that cancers are caused by mutated genes. Later Varmus served as NIH director under Bill Clinton, presiding over a period of huge funding increases. "Time always looks shorter in retrospect," he says. "I think, hey, in 30 years mankind went from being almost completely ignorant about how cancer arises to being pretty damn knowledgeable."
By the way, the article you posted is not anti animal testing.
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