I should add that alternatives are being found for some applications, such as skin cell cultures to test the effect of products on human skin. Since it is safety that is the main requirement for testing, this is enabling a great deal of animal testing to come to an end, however, more and more research that requires more complex interactions is becoming necessary. We still cannot simulate entire biological systems, let alone organisms, neither can we produce many organs adequate for testing. There was a
functional rat's heart grown recently (that operated that 1% of a normal heart's capacity- actually quite an achievement) but it requires the natural collagen scaffold of a rat's heart to produce. As well as the obvious future human application for organ production, it may one day enable another alternative to testing on whole live animals. The biting irony is that producing alternatives to animal testing may require animal tests to be performed.
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Another thing against animal testing that I thought of. Most other creatures are very different from humans anyway - How do scientists know that a product/chemical/drug will behave in the same way when applied to humans as it does when applied to animals? Doesn't this make some animal tests even more pointless and unreliable?
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Actually, that is an interesting point. Animals are more similar to human and other species than most people realise. But does such similarity to humans support or further vilify such testing?
Obviously, the choice of species is an important one. Research species are necessarily well understood, as both the reason for and result of using them. You would not test penicillin-related medicines on guinea pigs, for example, that's just common sense (it is deadly poisonous to them). Instead you would use mice, as they were used when penicillin was first being refined into a usable treatment. Similarly, research into many human infectious diseases, when a whole organism is required, needs species that can actually be infected by the particular pathogen, which (and I cannot abide this) often means testing on great apes. Some diseases, such as HIV, only recently jumped species to us from these primates, where such strains are known as SIV. It works both ways, wild mountain gorillas are under threat from human measles, and all great apes are periodically ravaged by Ebola.
Normally one would select several species for preliminary examinations in case there will be any important differences. The use of transgenic animals is also becoming more common (animals with human genes), and may soon see the practical application of chimeras, whose organs are physiologically and genetically almost entirely human.
What is not frequently mentioned is that animal testing paves the way for human trials. This is where they are refined and their effects on specifically human physiology is examined. These are usually very similar, if not identical, to effects in the non-human species they were first tested on. The rules for human trials are even more strict than they are for trials on sentient animals, they are rarely given the go-ahead without data from animal tests beforehand and of course, it is very rare that you will be allowed to dissect your human test subjects.