Civilised persons innately are repulsed by vivisection and find it repugnant. Vivisection -- or animal experimentation or animal research -- is cruel, causes pain, suffering and torment, and is a self-evident atrocity. Yet arguments against vivisection based upon innate feelings or gut instinct are, by definition, metaphysical. They can not be proven -- or, importantly, disproved, either -- and sadly have failed to halt this odious practise. Rather, vivisection steadily has increased despite such opposition.
The practical, if reluctant, conclusion is that ethical, moral and philosophical arguments have been ineffective in advancing vivisection's abolition. However, science itself has proven vivisection does not and can not work.
Science is empirical. It deals with what can be demonstrated physically, and with what may be inferred logically from the empirically demonstrable: Sound reasoning applied to verifiable, and verified, premisses. Vivisection fails in all these respects, and is scientifically disreputable and disrespectful.
Experimental biomedical research, especially that realm of it employing the so-called animal model system, is inherently, irreparably, fundamentally and fatally flawed. The animal model system is the study of anatomy, physiology or pathology in non-human animals with respect to applying the information obtained to human function and disease. The animal model system is an erroneous methodology.
All scientific enquiry must use a research method. A correct method of scientific enquiry is one that is known, prior to the commencement of actual research, to yield results applicable to the purpose of the enquiry. The procedure selected must predict reliably that the results obtained will be both relevant and pertinent to the investigation generally and to the subject of the investigation specifically. Results need not necessarily be precise, yet they must be accurate. At best, the results also will be helpful or constructive. (Not all research is successful. If the end product were known in advance, research and scientific enquiry would be unnecessary.)
Vivisection lacks any reliable predictive features, which features are the hallmark of all true science, making vivisection scientifically invalid. Only after enquiries are made of human subjects can results culled from animal experimentation be evaluated accurately. This makes vivisection useless at best. The medical dangers of vivisection emerge from the false predictive value vivisectors assume. One medical disaster follows another because the controlling medical establishment relies, preponderantly and often exclusively, upon the grossly unreliable, to the detriment of both humans and animals.
All beneficial advances in medical science come from clinical human research. Beneficial medical treatments are not developed on animals. A medical treatment becomes beneficial by being developed, refined and -- finally, to the extent possible -- perfected on human patients clinically in need of the specific treatment. This process, of clinical human research, must occur sooner or later, regardless of on how many animals the treatment first is tried or tested. The underscoring guideline of clinical human research may be expressed, to paraphrase, as, "A patient in need is a patient in deed, and vice versa." It is both a co-operative and a voluntary endeavour, between the subject patient and the research physician -- always a reciprocal relationship, a two-way street.
That there are biological similarities among animals and people does not legitimatise vivisection. Such similarities do not exist to the degree of biological complexity and consistency required for vivisection to work; they do not exist to the extent of being useful. Inter-species similarities, in the context of and in terms of the amazingly complex and complicated nature of an integrated, whole organism, are spectacularly superficial.
Further obscuring the meaningfulness of similarities, both real and apparent, is the knowledge --which was not obtained from animal experimentation -- that the same end may be achieved by differing means and that differing ends may be achieved by the same means. Both initially and ultimately, particular knowledge of a subject is attainable only by studying that subject, using a scientifically correct study method. Vivisection fails on both counts. Indeed, true science and vivisection contravene each other. Vivisection is a false science, a pseudo-science. To medical science it is what astrology is to astronomy.
One derives a broad, general body of knowledge not by enquiring broadly or generally, but by narrowing the field of enquiry while enquiring variously and often, then assimilating and correlating the results of those many enquiries. This is the fundamental difference between the gross and the refined, and it is a profound difference. The realisation of generalised principles invariably results from inspired, intuitive leaps from a thorough comprehension of constituent special case instances.
Vivisection portrays a static fixation upon the gross. Thus, medical progress and understanding are so slow, so diminished and so lacking, and the medical progress that is made and the medical understanding that is attained occur in spite of, not because of, vivisection.
Animal experimentation intrinsically is a scientific failure. This is not to state vivisection would be acceptable if it did work, but that moral or ethical considerations, however legitimate, are somewhat superfluous. It is redundant to ruminate or to speculate further on what already has been established by irrefutable proof. Yet because of the powerful emotional appeal of ethics and of morality, the more productive and conclusive scientific arguments opposing vivisection are eclipsed. This in turn permits what the vast body of incontrovertible evidence against vivisection reveals to be evaded, avoided or ignored: Vivisection is completely devoid of even so much as a vestige of scientific value or merit.
Also arguing overwhelmingly against vivisection is biological diversity, better known by its shortened, combined form as biodiversity, an important force of natural law. The premisses and principles of biodiversity are incompatible with and again contravene the faulty concept of the animal model system in human biomedical research. These premisses and principles are rational. They have been verified empirically. They have been proven to be true. The great genetic variability biodiversity displays, being both essential to and fundamental to the ecological integrity of planetary life, negates assertions of validity to extrapolating data between or amongst species. Both mechanically and dynamically, profound differences amongst profuse species of biological organisms are the foundation of the existence of ecologically stable life and of its enduring continuation in the global environment.
Such is science. When the results of animal experiments do coincide with those of legitimate research, it is just that -- a coincidence. Coincidence, chance, fate, the luck of the draw, these indeed do exist, and often are a part of daily life, yet never of science. They neither can be anticipated nor predicted, and the results they yield are extraneous to any scientific research method employed. Scientific methods proceed in such a way as to establish reliably the relationships between causes and their effects, and the potentials of those relationships. Coincidences or chance events have no such reliable causal or potential value. The only way in which vivisection helps advance scientific discovery, knowledge and application is by its total absence.
Jean Martin Charcot, 1825-1893, the French neurologist whose pupil, Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939, the Austrian psychiatrist and the founder of psychoanalysis, credited his insight into the nature of hysteria as having contributed to the early psychoanalytic formulations on the subject, and who more widely is credited as the father of modern neurology, was a critic of vivisection, having stated: "Experiments on animals designed to establish the localisation of cerebral functions can teach us at best the topography of that particular species -- never the topography of man."
Carl Gustav Jung, 1875-1961, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and the founder of analytical psychology, withdrew from the study of medicine, entering the field of psychology instead because he couldn't tolerate the vivisectionist exhibitions of medical training. In his autobiographical Erinnerungen, Traeume, Gedanken (Memories, Dreams, Reflections), Jung labelled vivisection as "barbarous, horrible and most of all superfluous."