Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "I adopted a test lab cat. Here's what happened." video.

  1. We're getting there, but people often don't understand just how much effort it's taken to get to the point where things can be tested without living test subjects. On the upside, things like heart cells on a chip can potentially be used for longer term studies to verify that something isn't toxic to the heart over a period of many years, rather than just the shorter periods that medical ethics would allow human/animal test subjects to be tested for.
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  2.  @whiteleopard1713  There's also an issue where at a certain point increasing the amount of plant matter that people eat increases emissions rather than decreasing them. Humans are ominivores and as such a bit of meat is necessary for proper health. It doesn't take much meat, most of it can be from plants. And, the amount of work that's needed to get all the necessary nutritional content in bioavailable forms from just plants is substantial. It can be done, but it's not cheap and it does require a ton of effort.
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  3. So, how many people do you think should die because the medicine wasn't ever developed? Things have improved a lot over the decades, but it's absolutely insane to pretend like we could have just skipped the animal testing for the more modern techniques using things like cells on a chip and super computers. The attitude that there shouldn't be any testing on animals is one of privilege. We have the privilege to call for the ending of the practice now, only because enough testing was previously done to enable scientists to develop other methods of testing that either don't involve animals or that are less harmful to them. But, this whole business that we're ready to stop completely is just insane. We're not there yet and likely won't be for quite some time.
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