Who Would I Rather See Live? How About Both

I bet the copywriter on whom the potential of 'rather' dawned is slapping himself backwards

This disturbing billboard has been polluting the brains of Americans recently. Being displayed in cities which have major medical or primate research facilities, it forces the viewer into an ethical question; in order for the girl to live the rat must die. Isn't it right, therefore, that we kill the rat?

But it's a false ethical question.

Perhaps an argument could be made that in the past, when our understanding of biochemistry and computer modelling were more limited, that there was some value in conducting research on animals. Perhaps. But today there really is no excuse. According to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, the value of using animals as test subjects for evaluating the effectiveness or safety of pharmaceuticals is dubious:

Ethical concerns are raised by the use of animals in experimental studies, particularly when they are subjected to painful procedures or toxic exposures. These concerns are accentuated by studies showing marked stress responses in animals undergoing common laboratory procedures. For example, routine handling, venipuncture, and gavage (the administration of test compounds through an oral tube) elicit striking elevations in pulse, blood pressure, and steroid hormone release that can persist for an hour or more after the event. Similarly, routine features of the laboratory environment—isolation, confinement, social disruption, noise, and restrictions on physical movement—have been shown to be noxious for animals. Together, these bodies of evidence indicate that even experiments that appear to be minimally invasive can be highly stressful for the animal subjects, and this finding applies to commonly used rodent species as well as larger and less frequently used animals. Stress effects are relevant to humane concerns as well as to the interpretation of scientific findings. Research on immune function, endocrine and cardiovascular disorders, neoplasms, developmental defects, and psychological phenomena are particularly vulnerable to stress effects.

And here is a list of examples of animal safety testing that didn't turn out so well.

Also, the speciesism implied in the billboard with the words 'researchsaves.org' is obvious. It implies that animal research saves lives while completely discounting the destroyed lives of animals. Also implied is that all research is conducted on animals, or that all research involves animals somehow.

I'll give the last word to Gary Francione over at  Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach (from their FAQ):

Question: If you are in favor of abolishing the use of animals as human resources, don’t you care more about animals than you do about those humans with illnesses who might possibly be cured through animal research?

Answer: No, of course not. This question is logically and morally indistinguishable from that which asks whether those who advocated the abolition of human slavery cared less about the well-being of southerners who faced economic ruin if slavery were abolished than they did about the slaves.
The issue is not whom we care about or value most; the question is whether it is morally justifiable to treat sentient beings–human or non-human–as commodities or exclusively as means to the ends of others. For example, we generally do not think that we should use any humans as unconsenting subjects in biomedical experiments, even though we would get much better data about human illness if we used humans rather than animals in experiments. After all, the application to the human context of data from animal experiments–assuming that the animal data are relevant at all–requires often difficult and always imprecise extrapolation. We could avoid these difficulties by using humans, which would eliminate the need for extrapolation. But we do not do so because even though we may disagree about many moral issues, most of us are in agreement that the use of humans as unwilling experimental subjects is ruled out as an option from the beginning. No one suggests that we care more about those we are unwilling to use as experimental subjects than we do about the others who would benefit from that use.

 Yeah.