Our Judo-Christian history teaches us that mankind was given ascendancy over all the other life forms on Earth. Over the millennia many people have distorted this ideal into into a belief that mastery over animals brings with it an assumed right to treat these animals in any way whatsoever that humans wished to do so and that the rights of all other creatures were irrelevant when these clashed with the "rights" of mankind. It would be wonderful if we could say that we have grown more enlightened but even in the 21st Century AD we have such obscenities as Spanish bullfights, animals used for painful tests of cosmetics and battery hen farms (I came across one accidentally whilst out hiking once; a truly depressing experience). Where medical science is involved, however, the ethical picture becomes more blurred. In an ideal world scientists would discover new life-saving drugs in the laboratory, run tests and computerised simulations on them and then when all the data had been collected and digested the new medicines would be released to a grateful world. In reality this just doesn't happen; what is effective in the test tube (in vitro) can be very different to what happens in life (in vivo) and at present the only way to be sure that a drug works, is relatively harmless to humans and has acceptable side-effects is to test it on humans. This if fraught with danger because an untried drug can have unknown toxicities and so the accepted testing route has of late been from the laboratory to animals before trials involving humans and sometimes even with all the safeguards in place a calamity like the disastrous trial of the anti-inflammatory drug TGN1412 which left several people critically ill despite rigorous testing beforehand. If animal experimentation was stopped, no doubt we would have many more such incidents with loss of human life a very real possibility.

One can argue that it is better for animals to die during early drug experimentation, rather than animals. However it can also be argued that people who take part in these early drug trials are usually volunteers who are fairly well paid for their participation; animals have no choice about volunteering and the only reward they can look forward to is a relatively painless death.