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Animal Testing: the Facts

Decent Essays

Why should animals not have the same rights that humans do? Maybe because they cannot talk, read books, or drive cars, but neither can some humans for that matter. So why is it that when an experiment, which was conducted to help treat type 2 diabetes, killed 203 people, it was halted immediately, although millions of animals die each year due to scientific experimentation? The answer is that many believe that animals are worthless or are not worth as much as human beings are, so they are therefore dispensable. The problem with that is animals are living things just like humans. Therefore, like human beings, they understand fear and experience pain. They also feel excitement and happiness. So why should they be denied the same basic rights …show more content…

The first issue is that this procedure has proved to be one-hundred percent ineffective. Studies show that there have been a reported fifty-five organ transplants coming from the non-human species. All of which have resulted to torment and fatality to patients and donor animals. This is just unproven and dangerous. The second issue is that it is extremely expensive. It has proven to be hazardous and cost more that human-to-human transplants (In 1995 it cost $250,000 per operation). Why should someone even spend so much money on a guaranteed failure? The last but very serious is that xenotransplantation has the chance of ablating animal viruses to “jump the species barrier” and ultimately kill humans. A similian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) that has been suspected to of been passed from animals to humans is HIV. The virus’s origin was in Central Africa, but couldn’t be contained and spread across the world. If these kinds of procedures continue the world may see an irreversible epidemic. If HIV/AIDS has had the power to kill of millions of people imagine what could happen if there was another virus like it. To try to minimize the error of accuracy mentioned in the previous paragraph some scientist resort to using species that have closer DNA to humans. A prime example is primates. An ape’s DNA and a human’s DNA only have a 1.6% difference. This should be the complete reason why primates should not be tested. We would not test on our cousins,

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