The Cruel Dilemma of Science: Who Must Die So We Can Live?
A viral post has reignited the debate between those who oppose "laboratory horrors" and those who remind us that without them, we would not have life-saving medicines. New data reveals how many mice and rabbits were killed in laboratories. Meanwhile, breakthrough technologies may make this dilemma a thing of the past.
In the building of the Faculty of Medicine, one of the most charged struggles in the world of science and ethics is taking place. An anonymous post recently published in a community associated with one of the universities in Israel reignited the fire, claiming that "in the upper floors of the building, horrific experiments are being carried out that the devil never created." Although it is impossible to independently verify all the claims made in the post, it managed to touch a raw nerve in one of the oldest struggles in the country, and dragged thousands of responses from both sides of the barricade.
This moral debate about animal testing has been accompanying the world of science for decades, but just now, something deep is beginning to change. Is technology about to make this ethical dilemma a thing of the past?
"Animals are not a test tube with a tail"
Someone who knows this struggle closely, from the days when social networks did not exist, is Beni Schlesinger. Schlesinger dedicated most of his life to protecting animals - he was one of the founders of the "Let Animals Live" association and one of the founders of the umbrella organization "Noah". Even today, after decades of activity, the images he saw in the past from a monkey testing laboratory remain etched in his memory. "They have no one to speak for them," he says in a conversation with Walla. "We must be their mouth and eyes."
Although Schlesinger clarifies immediately that he is not a scientist, but an activist who speaks from experience and exposure to the difficult sides of the field, he does not evade the moral complexity that many skip over.
"On the one hand, I am of course against experiments and against the suffering and exploitation of animals," Schlesinger admits honestly. "On the other hand, I also understand that when I was hospitalized or when I take a painkiller, these things also went through animals. It is clear that I want animal testing to stop, but if an experiment is already being done, at least minimize their suffering."
Schlesinger's main doubt does not concern only the experiment itself, but the local oversight mechanisms. "They tell me there is oversight and there are committees, I live in Israel. I don't automatically trust those who oversee. There are interests and there is money," he warns. According to him, the most important question is the question of necessity: "There are experiments that are done and are not related to medicine at all. Every experiment must be checked: what is it done for? What does it promote? Is there really no other way? You can't say 'that's how experiments are done' and end the discussion."
If Schlesinger tries to bridge the moral contradiction with pragmatism, then Yossi Wolfson, from the Israeli Society Against Animal Experiments, presents a firm and uncompromising position.
"It is not by chance that an ordinary person is not allowed to enter those laboratories in the dark basements. Animal experiments are a scourge that belongs in the dark pages of history - alongside human sacrifice, slavery, and human experimentation," says Wolfson in a conversation with Walla. "It involves surgeries without anesthesia, causing severe diseases, starvation, electrocution, causing burns, force-feeding with poisons, inflicting deformities (such as paralysis, injury, and blindness). The published data show that every year in Israel, experiments are conducted on hundreds of thousands of animals, and almost all the animals are killed at the end of the experiments as if they were merchandise thrown in the trash."
Statistics and Reality
The numbers behind this discussion tell a complex story. According to the data of the Council for Animal Experiments at the Ministry of Health for 2025, this moral struggle is translated into hundreds of thousands of lives every year:
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Scope of experiments: over 345 thousand animals were used for research in Israel - a slight increase compared to the previous year.
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Verdict: about 309 thousand of them were killed at the end of the experiments.
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Who pays the price? The vast majority are mice and rats, alongside birds and fish (about 61 thousand together).
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Other animals: out of 624 rabbits that participated in the experiments - 409 were killed. Out of 891 pigs - 714 were killed.
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Survivors: only about 28 thousand animals continued to be used for other research, while a few hundred were rehabilitated, adopted, or returned to nature.
"Good luck convincing a parent whose child is sick"
On the other hand, in the world of research, science, and academia, they strongly reject the claim that experiments are carried out out of convenience or indifference. Researchers and officials in academia emphasize that the difficult and emotional descriptions cannot serve alone as a basis for a scientific judgment of the necessity of the experiments. According to them, certain procedures may indeed cause deep aversion in those who do not come from the field, but the central question that stands before them is scientific: is there an alternative capable of providing the necessary information without using a whole animal?
The discussion around the topic gets another angle when it touches on human lives and the development of medical treatments. "If one day I have cancer, and someone offers me a drug that killed a hundred mice, but it will save my life, I will take it without blinking," wrote one of the commenters in the stormy discussion that developed online. According to him, it is easy to oppose experiments as long as the question remains philosophical in the air, but reality changes the moment a person or their family member faces a serious illness.
Is the news coming from Washington?
Precisely in the heart of this deadlock, a dramatic change is coming these days from the heart of the regulatory establishment in the United States. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has published draft guidelines on alternatives to animal testing in drug development. The move is intended to allow a gradual transition from animal testing as a default, towards innovative models focused on human biology: organs-on-a-chip, organoids, and advanced computer simulations.
The tailwind for the move comes from the highest levels in Washington. "This draft guidance advances our commitment to replace animal testing with human-relevant and scientifically-based methods," declared US Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
