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Animal Experimentation Research

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Imagine yourself strapped to a table while strangers with cold hands pry open your eyes to drop a burning liquid onto your pupils, all while poking and prodding your limbs. This kind of needless torture happens hundreds of times every day as scientists try to find answers to scientific questions, only to find out that all of the pain and suffering was all for nothing. Animal dissection has a long history that dates back to the Stone Age, but did not gain traction until the seventeenth century. At this time, English physician William Harvey managed to demonstrate circulation of blood using animals and then applied it to humans showing the value of vivisection for accurately illustrating physiology as well as anatomy in 1628 (Judson 15). After …show more content…

According to NEAV, “The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has noted that 92 percent of all drugs that are shown to be safe and effective in animal tests fail in human trials because they don’t work or are dangerous.” The article goes on to explain that out of the 8 percent of drugs that do pass the human trials, half of them must be relabeled to account for unforeseen side effects on human subjects. The ramifications of these failing experiments cost companies millions of dollars. Furthermore, PETA explains that there are several drugs that are essential to human medicine that react quite negatively in animals. For example, aspirin kills cats and causes birth defects in several other animals including dogs and monkeys. If that drug had first been tested on cats, it never would have reached the market and provided the extensive relief it has to date. Also, animals in laboratories to be experimented upon are known to display understandably stressed behavior which jeopardizes the accuracy and credibility of the results. For example, in a NewScientist article by Ann Baldwin, the dangers of anxious animals are explained. The report writes that “rats housed in such conditions (laboratories) show an inflammatory response in their intestines accompanied by leaky blood vessels.” The article proceeds to examine the outcome of that response (along with others) and

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