Why We Should Animal Testing Be Banned

Animal testing is always a behind closed doors situation. Most people are aware that it is happening yet never give it a second thought. An estimate of more then 115 million animals all around the world, including the most common mice, rats, rabbits, and monkeys, are used in experiments every single year (“11 Facts About Animal Testing”, n.d.). And according to change.org the “USA spends $16 billion dollars annually for animal testing at tax payers' expense.” (“Sign the Petition”, n.d.)

Animals are found throughout lives of humans. As companions, entertainment, test subjects and food, animals serve vital roles throughout our lives.The Animal Bill of Rights, through the Animal Legal Defense Fund, attempts to defend the basic legal rights of all animals. However, to weigh the need for such an act, one must compare the suffering of animals to the benefits such suffering gives to humankind. It’s much more important to highlight the crucial medical advances that lab animals have provided over the injustices they may suffer, but this suffering can not and should not be ignored. It is with measure that we do not enact a bill of rights for animals, however we bring new awareness of animal research and the ethical treatment of all

There is much debate over whether animal testing should be allowed or not. Some people think that it is not essential to sacrifice animals for human benefits because they are being abused and tortured severely during experiments. Some others who stand against animal testing claim that humans eliminate many lives on earth in order to safe humans’ lives, so there is no justice because even animals have the right to live on earth, yet these people do not consider the truth that animals are being used in the food industry or in the laboratories. Thus, if someone asks how many animals are being used in the laboratory experiments around the world every year, who can give an accurate answer? It can be one, ten, or fifty million. It is difficult to find the exact figure on this question because people only read news through mass media such as having a new vaccine which can help human avoid uterus cancer or a new medicine help humans cure strokes, but they also need to know how many lives of the animals would have to take in order to get theses vaccines. Therefore, some organizes think that animal testing is one of the most disturbing experiments ever, and it should be banned. Despite many controversies with opposing opinions, a compromise can be made in order to reduce the use of animals in the laboratory experiments.

Animal testing has been bad of the years and it can even be dated back to the ancient times of the greek. Physicians would dissect animals with the pure interest to obtain knowledge. But even then, one such physician stated that he would rather use a pig as his subject because he wanted to.The ethics of animal testing has always been questioned. Humans do not want to think of animals as on the same level of us. The similarity is terrifying and makes the cruelness obvious. In the 16 century it has been recorded that early vivisectionists, scientists who perform experiments and operations on live animals, did not consider animals to be of the same lineage of us and barely cared for them.The remaining are used as test dummies for products.

Do you know how many animals are killed yearly for the use of animal testing? More than 100 million animals are murdered. Testing on animals is cruel and inhumane. However, alternate methods can be used to replace the need for animals. As a final point, animal tests are more expensive than other methods. Animals have been used to practice on since antient times.

According to Humane Society International, “Animals used in experiments are commonly subjected to force feeding, forced inhalation, food and water deprivation, prolonged periods of physical restraint, the infliction of burns and other wounds to study the healing process, the infliction of pain to study its effects and remedies, and ‘killing by carbon dioxide asphyxiation, neck-breaking, decapitation, or other means.’” As you can see theses animals are being treated cruelly and inhumane, just reading that paragraph makes shivers run down my spine. We use animals for testing when according to Should Animals Be Used for Scientific or Commercial Testing?, “Animal tests are more expensive than alternative methods and are a waste of government research dollars.” Animal tests cost more than alternative methods and as it say in the text a waste of government research dollars. It's crazy to think that this is happening every day since, “Animals can suffer like humans do, so it is speciesism to experiment on them while we refrain from experimenting on humans”(Should Animals Be Used for Scientific or Commercial Testing?). Even though we don't think of animals as humans because they are not, does not mean that they can not suffer like a human. Another thing that most of the animals being tested on are mice, rats, rabbits, and guinea pigs, When 11 Facts About Animal Testing wrote about these animals and what happens to them they wrote, "Several

Imagine having no rights, being treated crudely everyday, and constantly being in pain. That is how animals that live their lives in labs feel every single day. Many animals die from being tested on, “Animals killed each year worldwide for experiments and drug research range from 50 to 100 million.” (Source A). There are organizations like PETA (People or the Ethical Treatment of Animals) that are trying to stop speciesism and get natural rights for animals. Speciesism is “the habit of attributing greater moral significance to the well-being of animals.” (Source C). Animals have the ability to think and feel just as humans do. This only makes it right for animals to possess rights like humans. Humans should not hold themselves higher than any other species, “humans are inherently no better than or different from other animals, and should have no right to hold our own interests above the interests of other species.”

Over 100 million animals get burned, crippled, poisoned and abused in United States labs every year. Animal experimentation or commonly known as animal testing, is where scientists test their chemicals and products on animals to make sure it is safe for human use. Animal testing should be used because it's not only harming the animals it's costing a lot of money and animal lives.Animal testing should not be used because it harms the animals. Some tests involve killing pregnant animals to test on their fetuses. ¨Many of the tests performed on animals in the name of science, opponents maintain, are downright barbaric, rendering their subjects damaged and disfigured.¨ (Animal testing: Is animal testing morally justified?)With the amount of tests being performed

Seventy million of lives are claimed by animal testing facilities and millions more survive through the horrific tests, suffering the psychological and physical consequences. “The use of animals in experiments at leading federally-funded labs has increased nearly 73 percent in the past 15 years, according to a new study conducted by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

Animal testing is remarkably cruel and inhumane. Animals that are used for testing are put in cages and isolated. They are usually, they are taken almost casually, housed appallingly, and denied anything close to a life (Newkirk). These animals are trapped their whole life and are stripped of their ways of life. Not to mention that within some of these laboratories, universities, and every other place that animal testing is conducted in, researchers treat animals very poorly. In one place, "workers were caught punching dogs in the face, screaming at the animals, and even simulating sex with each other while trying to inject a frightened beagle" (Newkirk). Not only do researchers do those cruel actions, but some "experimenters force-feed chemicals to animals, conduct repeated surgeries on them, implant wires in their brains, crush their spines, and much more" (PETA). Some may say that this does not happen and that animals do not experience pain anymore due to new laws, like the Animal Welfare Act (AWA). But, the truth is, these "laws" do barely anything, if nothing, to help stop the cruel

Imagine walking into a cosmetic or medical research laboratory and seeing thousands of animals locked up in cages, deformed, injured, even dead. In 2010 a total of 26 million animals in the US were tested on (thehastingscenter.org). Animals have the closest genetics to humans than anything else yet animal testing is a cruel and inhumane job and not all animals have similar organ functions to humans. Animals should not be used for scientific or commercial testing.

Debates about animal research are often polarized. On one hand, increased knowledge, medical treatments or enhanced animal production are seen to justify any harm. On the other, animals have rights (Fisher, 2014). Ethics, alongside a more informed understanding of the benefits of research and of the aims of animal rights, may in fact produce a more sophisticated common ground between both sides of the debate.

Over 26 million animals are tortured and tested on every year, in the United States alone. Most are used for testing medical treatments, which people for animal testing say has saved countless numbers of lives, but how many has it destroyed in the making? Although testing on animals has lead to major scientific breakthroughs, the way in which they reach them is incredibly inhumane. We having the ability, should try our best to stop this wide spread animal testing because the tests are inhumane, the animals are abused during the tests, and the results can be achieved in other ways.

According to “Breakthroughs Might Mean the End of Animal Testing” if a product or chemical is safe for animals, only 8% of those products will work on humans.(John Ericson 1) Animals have been used for testing for thousands of years, due to their similarities with humans. Over the years public support has significantly decreased. The cruel practice has sparked controversy and needs to be stopped. Animal testing is used throughout the U.S which is why it needs to be banned. If animal testing was banned worldwide, it would prevent millions of animal deaths.

There are about 17 to 70 million animals used each year for experiments in the US laboratories. These animals are taken from breeding services or kidnapped from their owners. Agencies in the US such as the National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense fund many of these experiments. Today, there are other options other than putting animals through suffering. Even though the animal welfare act is in place, animal experimentation goes against animal rights because animal testing is unreliable, cruel, unnecessary, and weak testing for science.