This song is an extension of some of the themes explored in vines. Our ability to justify animal testing relies on a contradiction. We say it is ok to test on animals because they are like us, but when we are asked why we are morally ok with this, we say it is because they are not like us. We can’t have it both ways. Anyone who sees footage of animal testing would undeniably categorize it as cruel yet we often let it persist because we believe it is in the best interest of humanity. What I’m hoping to drive home with the quote used at the beginning of the song is that this thinking is incredibly fallacious and harmful. 98% of drugs tested safe in animals don’t pass human clinical trials. Our physiology is fundamentally different from animals and doesn’t produce reliable results. You would get more accurate results by flipping a coin. Yet we continue to use animals because there is a huge industry built around it. You need not look any further than the fact that human favorites such as onions and chocolate are harmful to dogs to get the gears turning that perhaps we react differently to drugs. The lyrics to this song were completely re-written between the demo and production phase of this record because views on the subject further evolved. Initially I believe that perhaps there might be some scenario in which testing on an animal could be appropriate if we had a metric that we could measure the importance and efficacy of specific test. The metric was if we would be willing to do the test on a mentally handicapped orphan baby (proposed by Peter Singer in Animal Liberation) then it would be appropriate to do the test on an animal. Most tests would fail to measure up to that metric, no one would be willing to harm a baby for the sake of some cosmetics, for instance. Yet the the more I thought about it, the more I have come to believe that we shouldn’t test on any animal at all, period. We don’t torture people because it isn’t effective in eliciting a confession, we don’t torture people because we believe it to be morally wrong. Even if torturing someone would bring about information to stop a terrorist attack, do we want to live in a world where we torture people? The same thinking can be applied to animal testing. We now live in a world where there are much more reliable models for predicting human reaction to a drug, animal testing is, and has been, obsolete for way too long for this cruel practice to be carried out. This song is dedicated to the brave individuals who risk their freedom to save animals that are trapped in this cruel system.