The sheer number of animals abused and killed for food [0][1] is 3 orders of magnitude larger than the number for research [2] (at least in USA). Animal research is more abstractly upsetting-sounding than killing animals for food (perhaps because we've been doing it for a briefer part of our species's existence), but the horrid conditions of most livestock raised for food in the US don't seem any better than those of lab animals; at least rats are anesthetized for the more gruesome experiments. There's also no clear reason to eat meat other than pleasure and food tradition, whereas animal medical experiments provide a unique means to massively improve our physical wellbeing.
I think that once we've reduced our meat consumption by 99.9%, then it might make some sense to spend energy coming up with alternatives to animal testing for medicine. For now, it's hard for me to see animal testing as the key bottleneck. If you profiled your code and found that one badly-implemented function was taking up 99.9% of your execution time, why would you ever waste any time optimizing the 0.1% function?
I think that once we've reduced our meat consumption by 99.9%, then it might make some sense to spend energy coming up with alternatives to animal testing for medicine. For now, it's hard for me to see animal testing as the key bottleneck. If you profiled your code and found that one badly-implemented function was taking up 99.9% of your execution time, why would you ever waste any time optimizing the 0.1% function?
[0] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/report...
[1] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/report...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218261/