I don’t love animal testing and I’m glad there are other means of testing many things. However, some things still require it.
The article above is full of half-truths and outright lies.
Where possible, researchers use animal alternatives. Animals are expensive, and every study that involves animals must be reviewed by an ethics committee. If a procedure might cause pain to an animal, the researcher must explain how they plan to relieve the pain—and if they don’t plan to give pain relief, they must have a strong experimental justification for it. In addition, any researcher doing studies with live animals must take species-specific ethics training annually. This training includes learning how to humanely euthanize animals when continuing the experiment would cause too much pain—allowing an animal to die could mean that it experienced a lot of pain. And so on, and so on.
While computers are essential for research, they simply cannot model a complex biological system.
There are many kinds of experiments that do not require testing in animals. For instance, I did not need live animals to try to figure out how dioxin is poisonous when I was in grad school—indeed, the kinds of experiments I did couldn’t have been done in animals. However, I used tissue extracts (taken from animals), and I grew cells, which need to be fed with fetal calf serum.
I could go on, but I won’t. The bottom line is that there is no substitute for animal use in research, unless one is doing plant research.