Talk:Animal testing

This page is not the place to give your views on animal testing. This page is for discussing the Wikipedia page animal testing.

POV issues

I don't really have a side in the general debate on animal testing, so please take what I say as good faith effort at improving the page. I understand the issue is emotional and important to many people on both sides of the debate. However, Wiki is not a forum for POV pushing from any faction. As a casual reader, this article gives me a very distinct POV impression of being written primarily from an anti-testing influence. Again I can understand and empathize with this position, but it doesn't make it right to push it. The references give undue weight to one side (especially regarding the sub-issue of vivisection). I didn't want to come in from the outside and slap a POV tag on this, but this really needs to be addressed. The references in general seem to have formatting issues, and really needed to be weeded out. Discussion of the arguments for and against should be restricted to the "historical debate" and ethics section, not sprinkled liberally throughout (e.g. in discussing how many cats are used, a quote regarding cruelty of the experiments is added. The section is discussing numbers, not the ethics. There is far too much bleed over of opinion into factual sections. If there is too much additional info, daughter pages are in order.

Please address these issues (source weeding, reduction in POV, restriction of ethics arguemnts to the aforementioned sections). Otherwise (and this is not intended as an ultimatum) a POV tag is probably in order. I'd much rather the active editors give the page a go over. Thanks!204.65.34.186 (talk) 21:47, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I've been editing pages that deal with this and related subjects for a couple of years now, and I have frequently had the same concerns as you do. There are many such pages, where there are editors who see these issues in different ways, and some of these editors feel very strongly that there should be more prominent animal rights views, and some of those have expressed strong anger when I have tried to express concerns similar to yours. This page here has a long history of getting to where it is now. Frankly, my opinion is that there are a lot of other pages that deserve NPOV tags more than this one does. If I may suggest, it doesn't accomplish much just to tag a page. Perhaps you would like to get involved seriously with editing content here, and work with other editors to provide well-sourced and balanced content to pages that interest you. Working with other editors can be hard work, but WP:CONSENSUS is the way to go. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:42, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

I agree, this article is highly biased from a content viewpoint and should be a POV rather than a debate or more general information piece. Maybe include some of the massively beneficial transplant, surgical procedures, avaccines and medications that have come about due to both pure scence and practical science research — Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.243.77.43 (talk) 09:22, 3 September 2011 (UTC)

You are right: we really need to expand the coverage of beneficial testing. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:20, 3 September 2011 (UTC)

I had some critical comments about that, but they hardly seem relevant now I've read the article. Ethical considerations, doubts about the usefulness of animal testing, cases of abuse and neglect, these are all legitimate aspects that the article must address, but not inserted in every paragraph. There should be no lack of topics that have similar strong opposition, nuclear power for example. Maybe find a suitable good quality article to use as a guide for the main structure? Or if there's some good reference work about animal testing, maybe a report about animal testing for the European commision or whatever could be used. But the way it is now.. DS Belgium (talk) 09:22, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. It's also dubious to claim - as is done in the first paragraph or so - that there are any significant number of biological/medical scientists (as opposed to, say, social sciences or physical sciences people) who think that there's any problem with (most) animal research. I may add a "dubious" tag. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Allens (talk • contribs) 15:05, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

BTW, not sure if the frog muscle bit is highly relevant, I think in most cases the frogs had to be killed and dissected before the experiments could be performed. Not absolutely sure though. DS Belgium (talk) 09:31, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

All of our understanding of muscle physiology comes from frogs. That the animals died before rather than after is an artificial distinction at best, especially considering that the tissue itself remains alive for several hours after being extracted. Mokele (talk) 14:37, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

I wasn't questioning the importance of the research, I just wasn't sure it met the definition of animal testing. But killing animals for the purpose of testing should be included (in contrast to for example studies on roadkill or material obtained from abbatoirs.), so you're right. DS Belgium (talk) 11:19, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

About the excessive criticisms in every paragraph, they are probably the remnant of the history of how the article was written. WP:CCC. Let me suggest that editors name specific examples here in talk, and we can look at deleting them, where there is consensus to do so. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:13, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

I noticed it's listed under WP:GA and the version at the moment of nomination has the same structure (and some of the same problems), so it seems futile for me to suggest major changes. Besides, having read the (unrelated) talk at Conspiracy Theory over the first documented use of that term, with arguments about WP:OR and the resulting debate in the discussion on WP:RS, I'm reluctant to get involved in what would likely become a mind-numbingly tedious process. No offence DS Belgium (talk) 12:53, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

None taken, thanks. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:01, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

Animals in Space Section?

I think animals sent to space, such as in the Soviet space dogs or American space monkeys programs may deserve a section. Any thoughts? — Preceding unsigned comment added by ElCordobes123 (talk • contribs) 15:37, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

I guess the only counter-argument would be that they represent only a tiny and atypical fraction of all animals used, but I think that is largely negated by their notability resulting from the extensive coverage in sources. Please feel free to WP:BE BOLD and go ahead and add it. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:43, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Maybe it should be a separate page? It's definitely worthy of inclusion on WP, but the current page is getting a bit unwieldy, IMHO. Mokele (talk) 20:44, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Split ethics section to own article

I suggest splitting the ethics section to a new article, for example titled Animal welfare and ethics in research, leaving a shorter introduction and a Main article:Animal welfare and ethics in research link. I find mainly two reasons:

• This article is too long and really needs splitting
• The subject of the target article is just as much a fork from the section Animal welfare#Laboratory animals as it is from this section, justifying a Main article:Animal welfare and ethics in research in that article as well, and probably in Animal rights too.

Mikael Häggström (talk) 09:33, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

• Leaning oppose. I would be concerned that such an article would end up being a POV fork along the lines of "why animal research is bad". You have to consider the edit history of this page, and indeed of the pages about animal rights broadly. It has been such a POV battlefield that I would hate to see the battle opened up again. It would be better to address your concern about the length of this page by pruning much of the anti-research POV (1 sided examples) from this page. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:09, 23 April 2011 (UTC)