It was a breath of fresh air to read of Andrew Linzey’s conviction that animals are not commodities for human use (“Champion for the beauty of beasts”, 8 August). However, there are also more prosaic reasons for moving beyond animal experimentation in our quest to find cures for debilitating health conditions. Animal diseases are different from ours, as are their responses to drugs. This means that the predictive value of animal experiments is very poor. Think, for example, of the “elephant man” drug test debacle of 2006, which left six young men with organ failure. The drug these volunteers received had been tested successfully on monkeys. Numerous other drugs have been withdrawn from the market due to adverse reactions, despite having passed through the ful