ARISE (Animal Replacements Innovate Scientific Experimentation)

By Stuart Chaifetz

Testosterone. Yeah, that’s right, I’ve got some - you want to fight about it? C’mon, I’ll take on you, your ugly brother, all his ugly friends, and anyone they ever had lunch with! GGGGGRRRRrrrrrrrrrrr....

We all know that having too much testosterone makes a person more aggressive and prone to violence. We know this because of experiments performed on animals. That’s right; a vivisector castrated a bunch of rats, they became less hostile, and lack of testosterone was the given reason why. They used animals, so it must be right...

Now mind you, it never occurred to the ‘scientists’ involved that the act of castration itself might instill enough fear in the rats to drive out any aggression they had (for the men reading this blog - just imagine a giant monster in a lab coat cutting your [censored] off with something the size of a scimitar, and you’ll understand what those poor rats went through).

At this point you are asking, and quite fairly, where am I going with this?

I am going right here, here and here; three articles all covering a new study that shows, as one of the headlines states:

“Testosterone’s aggressive impact is a myth. It makes you friendlier.”

Whoa - that’s, that’s, well....friendlier? Testosterone??? The testosterone? Yep.

This study was done on humans, while the original study was done on rats, and they produced opposite results. Yet again, animal research proves to have no bearing on human kind...except to completely ingrain utterly fraudulent information upon the public psyche.

Testosterone has become synonymous with aggression and this definition is part of our language and thought. Just watch any movie with two big guys staring each other down, and you’ll hear someone say that they can smell the testosterone in the room (they may be smelling something, but it isn’t testosterone).

Here’s a quote from one of the articles:

“Popular scientific literature, art, and the media have been attributing the roll of aggression to the arguably best known sexual hormone for decades. Research appeared to confirm this - the castration of male rodents evidently led to a reduction in combativeness among the animals. The prejudice thus grew over decades that testosterone causes aggressive, risky, and egocentric behavior. The inference from these experiments with animals that testosterone produces the same effects in humans has proven to be false...”

I was recently asked, by another person in the anti-vivisection movement, how I respond to the often asked question about the role of animal experimentation in history. This new study, which exposed the fact that for decades false information produced by animal research misshaped and sent science down the wrong path, is the quintessential answer. Testosterone may be just the latest example of animal research getting it wrong, but it is emblematic of the distinct and fatal flaw of using animals to judge human reactions.

There is a seemingly endless cascade of faulty and unsound data produced by animal research. The question should not be what good animal experimentation has done for humanity, but just how bad the damage is.