Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Can we be absolutely sure pesticides are used safely?
Not entirely, but like Hitler (and according to movies, every
Roman emperor, every pope, and every medieval king) we
employ testers—not in the form of humans, but animals.
All pesticides must be approved by the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA), where the pesticide under con-
sideration is given to laboratory animals at different dos-
ages. The animals' health is monitored over time and used
to gauge the threats to human health a pesticide may pose.
The EPA then determines whether the pesticide should
be allowed and, if it is, the specific instructions on how it
should be applied.
Is it cruel to test pesticides on animals? It certainly isn't
something we enjoy doing, but not to test on animals will
cause us to harm humans—a notion on which 90 percent
of toxicologists agree. Pesticides decrease the cost of food,
and make fruits and vegetables more affordable. Raise the
price of these healthy foods and cancer rates and other
health problems in humans will rise. Help the lab animals,
and you harm some humans. Modern, democratic societies
must make a trade-off between harm to laboratory animals
and harm to humans. In a sense, we must “pick our poi-
son,” while trying to make the overall harm to animals and
humans as low as possible.
Hitler was willing to sacrifice fifteen girls to save himself.
The modern world is willing to sacrifice a small number of
laboratory animals to protect millions of humans. Moreover,
the EPA continues to find ways to reduce testing on animals
without sacrificing food safety, like recent developments in
molecular and computational sciences, which can sometimes
be substituted for animal experimentation.
In June 2013
The Wall Street Journal
hosted a debate titled
“Would Americans Be Better Off Eating a Mostly Organic
Diet?” and it tended to center on pesticides. It featured one per-
son who answered yes and one who answered no, to the ques-
tion in the title, and the justification for their answers describes
