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PRO:
Our forbears suffered and died prematurely from a host of diseases, the names of which are scarcely known today by Canadian children.
These advances came about because of biomedical experimental research using animals.
But despite the advances, we still do not know what causes such diseases as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, osteoporosis, Lou Gehrig's disease and schizophrenia.
Experiments test ideas, which in turn must be tested and confirmed. About 3,000 research projects led up to heart operations. Vaccines, drugs, antibiotics, new surgical skills or nutritional knowledge come only from biomedical research - and biomedical research must use animals.
Scientists constantly invent and adapt many ways to do research, such as analytical equipment and methods, diagnostic tools, cell, tissue and organ cultures and computer modeling.
These methods have led to a 40% reduction in the numbers of animals used in research in the last 30 years but they cannot eliminate animal research entirely.
While components of a study can be carried out in isolated ways, nothing can stimulate the complex cascade of integrated events that go on in the living animal body. All the systems - blood, nerves, muscles, hormones, enzymes - must work together. Slight flaws created disease. One cannot study high blood pressure or diarrhea in a test tube.
Dismal Record:
Historically, animal extremists have a dismal record in their opposition to the use of animals in biomedical research. They opposed the work of Lord Lister, the father of antiseptic surgery. They maligned Koch and Pasteur, the founders of microbiology and immunology. They campaigned against the rabies, anthrax and dog distemper vaccines. They harassed Banting for using dogs in his diabetes research and protested his Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin.
Now animal extremists run campaigns against using animals and oppose the use of animals in AIDS and vision research. Vision research has given sight to millions of people who have glaucoma, cataracts, and detached retinas.
It is biomedical research that protects people and animals from the cruelty and ravages of disease.
Animals and humans share about 300 known diseases. Veterinary and human medicine are branches of one science and they use the same research methods. There are more vaccines available for animal diseases than human diseases.
More than 91% of animals used in medical research at the University of Western Ontario in 1989 were mice and rats, specially bred, in many varieties. Of the rest 1.3% were rabbits and 4.6% were guinea pigs; 1.3% were pigs (used mainly in surgical research, including transplantation) and frogs, less then 1%.
Dogs and cats together compromised 0.7%. They were abandoned animals acquired from pounds and used mainly in non-recovery experiments, which means the animals die under anesthesia, as they would in the pound.
The Ontario Animals for Research Act requires that pounds make dogs and cats, which would otherwise be killed at the pound, available to registered research institutions.
Ten to 20 million abandoned dogs and cats are killed every year in pounds and shelters in North America. Research requires fewer than two per cent of these animals that would die otherwise, die uselessly, in the pound.
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