Instead of everything causing cancer, isn't it possible that lab rats just tend to get cancer alot?

Answer 1

I think a person's individual makeup determines whether he will get cancer, or not. For example. if smoking caused lung cancer, how do you explain people who smoked all the lives, and are in the seventies and eighties, and still don't have cancer?

Answer 2

I used to keep rats as pets, and all the female ones developed mammary cancer. It's very common in rats so you might have a good point there. However laboratories (unfortunately) use a lot more different animals than just rats. This is just one of the many reasons why animal testing doesn't really prove anything about humans.

Answer 3

Good question!....There is a question on this site about conspiracy theories...this just might be one. How do we know that we get cancer more than rats? Any idea what the rat population of the world is? It is estimated that in India alone the rat population exceeds the human population by at least one billion!...and then there is New York.....

Answer 4

They actually do because they breed a variety of rats that get cancer more often the normal rats. They sometimes want to make huge discoveries to publish papers and stuff. A lot of those experiments are totally tweaked.

Answer 5

Researchers GIVE the rats cancer so they can try to cure it. They just don't get cancer like we do, very rare for it to occur naturally. And everything DOESN'T cause cancer.

Answer 6

We get cancer alot more than lab rats....

Answer 7

Yes. We know little about cancer and much less how it differs in such very different species.

Answer 8

hmmmm we would probably consume more antioxidants in our lifetime than what the rats would intake (well not the same amount but equal to)