There are many inhumane things done to animals outside of the lab. Does that mean that we should work to reduce the cruelty of things like glue traps, or that we should increase the cruelty of animal research?
I'm sorry that you have to fill out a lot of paperwork if you want to inflict deliberate pain and suffering on a living creature.
The ethical questions raised by animal experimentation are a well-trodden debate, and I suspect that you have spent enough time listening to, perhaps even engaging in them, not to rehash them here.
We need medical advancements for humans, and sometimes that requires animal testing. That may be, but we also need to advance in our ethics and morals while we advance in our technology.
"You can judge a society by how they treat their weakest members."
In the US, child protection laws were modeled on previously created animal rights laws.
Unless you find a way to hack the process, of course. In one case I know, the surveyees were signed on as co-investigators, in order to take advantage of a loophole allowing researchers to do research on themselves without ethics approval.
FWIW:
Spent most of my life too sick to hold down a job and hid behind the label "homemaker and full time mom".
Spent about 3.5 months bedridden.
Diagnosed in May 2001 with "atypical cystic fibrosis".
Summer 2002: While attending GIS school in the smoggy LA area, got on boatloads of medication that doctors would not give me when I was bedridden and had no diagnosis. This helped save my life but left me a mess.
Spent the next several years getting off the drugs.
Antibiotic-free for something over 7 years (iirc).
Medication free since sometime in summer/fall of 2009.
Generally treated like a nutcase by the CF community which can't admit their real problem with me is they firmly believe the mantra "people like you don't get well" while simultaneously raising tens of thousands of dollars for the CF foundation and chanting "let CF stand for 'cure found'".
(Disclaimer: I'm actually starting an HN-like website for rare disease people in a week or two; I had (or have) a rare type of cancer called Chordoma.)
And I don't care how many downvotes I get either; the guys who where complaining about the increasing lack of focus on HN earlier today were right.
