Animal Vegans

Can vegetarians/vegans avoid animal tested products?

I’ve been a vegetarian before, and after a brief period I am considering it again. This time, I decided to look into it more. I was wondering how it’s possible to avoid products tested on animals. Not just paracetamol over-the-counter etc., but say cancer treatment.
(Excuse the seemingly misplaced category – this was the most suitable).

One in three women and one in two men will get cancer at some time in their lives (making it much less of a hypothetical than being stranded on a desert island with just a pig, or on an iceberg with just a hamburger).

Unless these people want to die a prolonged and painful death they accept treatment which has, by law, been tested on animals. Some may opt for ‘alternative’ treatments, which means their cancer would in fact be untreated, since ‘alternative’ is just another word for ‘untested and unproven’. If such treatments had been proven to be effective they would no longer be ‘alternative medicine’, they would just be ‘medicine’.

So a vegetarian or vegan with a deadly life-threatening illness like cancer wouldn’t be able to avoid animal-tested medication; even if they refused conventional cancer treatment they would, without a shadow of a doubt, accept and indeed plead for pain relief when the inevitable consequence of that refusal happened. Anyone who says they wouldn’t has never seen anyone die of cancer.

It’s an uncomfortable truth that most medical advances would not have taken place without animal testing. I am not convinced that there are more reliable ways to test drugs. I wish there were, but I’m not convinced, and it is too simplistic to argue that animals are not physically the same as us or that some drugs that have been found safe in animals have proved unsafe for humans.

I’m vegan; I owe my life to animal tested drugs and each day I take a potentially life-saving drug which has, by law, been tested on animals to – it is hoped – prevent a recurrence of cancer.

None of this makes me any less of a vegan. Being vegan is about minimising your personal contribution to animal suffering and exploitation as much as is reasonably and practically possible. It isn’t about being a martyr and sacrificing your life isn’t required.

The Philosophy of Vegan Values: Go Vegan. End Animal Use

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