> try to imagine that we live in a world where no one has ever used animals in research before, and someone proposes it for the very first time Why do I have t

> try to imagine that we live in a world where no one has ever used animals in research before, and someone proposes it for the very first time Why do I have to imagine? We live in that world. At some point in our history people decided to use animals in research. It seems like this is a slight-of-hand - it's asking us to imagine ourselves, now in that environment. But most of us are far removed from hunting, killing animals for food, raiding, etc. and don't live in a time where most kids died before adulthood and where pricking your thumb on a rose could cause an infection leading to death. In our history, we know that people treated other people pretty poorly, and animals even worse. There was no problem in using animals in research. > Even if you can find one particular invention – insulin is often brought up Manned flight and space travel were both preceded by animal experiments. The first unmanned balloon flight had a sheep, a duck, and a rooster - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ballooning#First_unmanned_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ballooning#First_un... : "The sheep was believed to have a reasonable approximation of human physiology." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeys_and_apes_in_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeys_and_apes_in_space comments "Before humans went into space in the 1960s, several other animals were launched into space, including numerous other primates, so that scientists could investigate the biological effects of spaceflight." A few examples drawn from medical history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Barnard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Barnard - "Barnard performed experiments on dogs while investigating intestinal atresia ... Barnard was able to reproduce this condition in a fetus puppy ... Jannie Louw used this innovation in a clinical setting, and Barnard's method saved the lives of ten babies in Cape Town. This technique was also adapted by surgeons in Britain and the US." Same page - "Gil Campbell who had demonstrated that a dog's lung could be used to oxygenate blood during open-heart surgery. (The year before Barnard arrived, Lillehei and Campbell had used this procedure for twenty minutes during surgery on a 13-year-old boy with ventricular septal defect, and the boy had made a full recovery.)" I picked Barnard because I know he was one of several doctors who practiced on dogs to get experience on how to do human open heart surgery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Kantrowitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Kantrowitz - "Using dogs and other animals as experimental subjects, Kantrowitz developed an artificial left heart, an early version of an oxygen generator for use as a component in a heart-lung machine and a treatment for coronary artery disease" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C - guinea pigs were discovered to be a good laboratory animal model for scurvy and the identification of vitamin C. Note that while Lind did human testing to identify that citrus fruits prevented scurvy, that didn't pinpoint vitamin C.