Question: what is your view on animal cruelty and animal testing?

Alessandro Guazzi answered on 12 Mar 2013:

The second part of this question is very tricky!

For the first part, which is my view on animal cruelty, I think that it is absolutely horrible and should be stopped and prosecuted. But by cruelty, I would understand people who are causing animals to suffer with no reason and are indifferent or happy about it.
Animal testing is not like that, and a lot of steps are set in place to ensure this is the case. In animal testing, you are trying to be the least hurtful possible, and have to demonstrate that anything you do to the animal is absolutely necessary. Many scientific advances which save a lot of lives rely on animal testing, because if you didn’t test on animals you’d have to either decide not to create a medicine or you would have to give a medicine to humans without knowing if it were entirely safe. I find that both these options are morally unacceptable, as I believe that human life is the most valuable thing that there is, so for these reasons I am for animal testing in these specific cases.
However, if better or equivalent methods were found to test drugs or procedures (maybe testing them on drug cultures or running very accurate simulations), then animal testing would no longer be necessary and I would then become very much against it. To my knowledge though, this is not yet the case- but it could be a really good PhD topic if you wanted to do it! 🙂