Rachel Pollock March 1, 2017 Essay #2 WRIT 122: Jennifer Foster Animal Testing Is Inhumane and Ineffective The harmful use of animals in experiments is not only cruel and inhumane but also often ineffective. Animals do not get many of the human diseases that people do, such as major types of heart disease, many types of cancer, HIV, Parkinson’s disease, or schizophrenia. There have been past occasions where drugs passed on animals weren’t even safe. There is no excuse for animal testing in today’s techy world, there are now many alternatives for animal testing that would put an end to the pain and suffering endured by these innocent animals during human testing.
Often these scientists will also use what is referred to as “Good Tactics.” For this method they will often question themselves, “Is the experiment really necessary?” “Can some sort of benefit be gained by it?” In addition to these guidelines the scientist also must follow a number of laws and regulations concerning the welfare and the care of the animals. With all the regulations and guidelines that are set, only the most essential of experiments are conducted on living creatures. Aside from the fact that vivisection is necessary, most of the experiments can be indeed considered moral due to guidelines the scientists follow and the fact that human lives are at stake. Vivisection is thought to be one of the most accurate ways to test scientific inquiries and is an absolute necessity in assuring the safety of the general public.
Testing on animals for pharmaceutical products is happening all over the world with not much talk about it. “For drugs and biologics, the focus of animal testing is on the drug’s nature, chemistry, and effects (pharmacology) and on its potential damage to the body (toxicology)” (FDA, “ Why Are Animals . . .”). A lot of people read on the label time and time again “Product Tested on Animals” not knowing just how cruel some of these testing methods actually are. “Vaccine testing in particular consumes an estimated 2.5 million animals every year because vaccines are often produced by weakening, inactivating, or detoxifying a virulent microorganism or toxin. Each batch of the finished product is then tested on animals, causing them pain, suffering,
Animal Testing in Drug Industry: Is It Appropriate or Not? Millions of people were killed by incurable diseases, such as smallpox, rabies, et cetera before the 18th century due to lack of knowledge in developing drugs and vaccine at that time. People caught by the diseases were hopeless because they knew that no one could help them. In the mid 1800s, animal testing was introduced to drug industry by Edward Jenner (Trueman, 2002). His brilliant discovery in developing smallpox vaccine by using animals helped a lot of people and gave hope to the medical field that incurable diseases were not incurable anymore. Although he was not the first man to use animal in experiments, his success made animal testing become commonly used in drug
For instance, the polio vaccine, tested on animals, reduced the global occurrence of the disease from 350,000 cases 1998 to 223 cases in 2012. Consequently, the testing of the polio vaccine on animals saved over 300,000 lives. However, animals are being harmed in this process, due to the drugs that are included in the vaccine. Additionally, 92% of the drugs that are tested on animal testing fail once they reach human trial, because it either doesn’t work, or they are potentially dangerous. This demonstrates that, animal testing is not needed if the drugs work on the animals, but fail once they reach human trials. In conclusion, animal testing is helpful to human beings, but it is hurtful and dangerous to the animals.
“Over 100 million animals are burned, crippled, poisoned, and abused in US labs every year.” “Also in Canada, 3.02 million animals were used in experiments in 2013 and 78,294 animals were subjected to severe pain near, at, or above the pain tolerance threshold of unanesthetized conscious animals.” Animal testing is frequently used for developing beauty products and medicines and in a lot more areas. Many people believe that the animal testing is necessary for humans. New vaccines and medicines are being developed continuously as humans are exposed to the pollution and lots of diseases. However, it is hazardous and fearful for people to use a new medicine without knowing its effect. People want to be guaranteed to the least safety and the virtue of the medicine.
Firstly, it is important to understand what exactly animal vivisection is, as well as the aspects of science in which it is used.
Vivisection—the practice of performing operations on live animals for the purpose of experimentation or scientific research— is one of the worst forms of animal abuse in our culture. Within-laboratory walls, what can occur to animals have no limits. Imagine spending the rest of your life as a hospital patient or as a prisoner, and that only begins to explain your life in a lab. What happens to you can be anywhere from uncomfortable to excruciating to agonizing and deadly—and the worst part is you’re helpless to defend yourself.
Testing on animals has been a method used for human advancement for thousands of years. The surgery that is conducted on living beings in known as vivisection; this practice has been dated back to the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans alike, using various procedures prior to the application on human subjects. Thanks to the help of these animals, countless people have been able to survive previously untreatable diseases due to the remarkable medical advances that have been developed. Diabetes, tuberculosis, and polio are a few to name within the myriad of other medical breakthroughs. “Animal experimentation, combined with the dissection of dead humans, allowed the scientists to learn about how the human body works and ultimately led
Animal vivisection is the study, experimentation and research of any animal. Animal rights activists are opposed to using animals for medical research and experimentation because humans do not have the right to use animals. With very few exceptions, we do not experiment on humans without their consent. Animals can’t give informed consent and the vast majority of experiments using animals are so invasive and damaging, that we would never even consider allowing humans to being subject to such experiments. Every year, animals are dissected, infected, injected, gassed, burned and blinded in hidden laboratories all over the world, most of the time without anesthetic or pain killers. If they aren’t killed by the testing, the animals are often not kindly but brutally killed. The dead animals are frequently left stacked in wheelbarrows in front of the animal cages.
The Food and Drug Administration, FDA, said that because of animal testing a majority of “vaccines, antibiotics, anesthetics, surgical procedures, and other approaches developed in animals for human use” are used by veterinarians to diagnose, treat sick and injured animals.(16). If vaccines were not tested on animals, millions of animals would have died from rabies, infectious hepatitis virus, canine parvo virus, and many more (17). Animal testing have also been involved in saving endangered species from extinction; a few examples would be: The Virginia Northern Flying Squirrel, Gray Wolf, Island Night Lizard and Steller Sea Lion. (18) These animals were saved from extinction through techniques like artificial insemination and embryo transfer
Vivisection, dissection, and injections were techniques used during prehistoric times. Vivisection and dissection were banned from Greece; yet, Galen still used both techniques almost every day during the research. At the time, these techniques were seen as very insightful however, the information the scientist got from experiments were often misused. For example, according to, History of Vivisection (2012), “Galen’s description of the uterus was based on dogs; the position of the kidneys was based on pigs; and his understanding of the brain was based on cows or goats” (pg.1). Moreover, dissections became a popular method used for testing animals; it became so popular that dissections were performed live in theatres for students to witness. The techniques used during this time were conducted on living animals. Therefore, these techniques caused a lot of controversy regarding its ethicality. The question of ethicality is a leech that will not leave, and has been dragged into present times causing huge
Why, because almost every American citizen is naive enough to believe that each product has testing done (typically performed on animals) before being sold on the market, ordinarily for safety purposes. However, what the general public fails to comprehend is that although specific types of animals are nearly identical to human beings, there is always a cautious chance that the testing has positive results on animals but conversely, the outcome may be significantly different for humans. Recently, researchers warned that “patients and physicians should remain cautious about extrapolating the finding of prominent animal research to the care of human disease … poor replication of even high-quality animal studies should be expected by those who conduct clinical research” (Animal Experiments: Overview). Diseases that are artificially forced upon animals in a laboratory are under no circumstances identical to those that transpire naturally in human beings. For example, cigarettes were formerly indicated as “safe” because it did no harm to animals whereas cigarettes are typically known in today’s generation to cause illnesses such as lung cancer. More importantly, several researches to cure cancer and its’ questionable motives have been successfully completed on mice although the solution has had no effect on the human body. Also, more than eighty-five HIV/AIDS vaccines have been prosperous in nonhuman archbishop studies, but as of 2013 every
The topic has ethical and moral aspects, as animals are genetically like us, thru can substitute for testing substances. In addition, in 1965 the local and state laws of the guideline in animal experiment were structured by the federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA) to instructing a strict minimum housing standard for the research animal including access to clean food and water, enclosure size, temperature and others. The AWA is closely inspected by the veterinarians. (animal-testing.procon.org) According to the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, the University of Maryland Baltimore Country believes that the responsibility of laboratory is essential in animal research to prevent and develop treatment of human and animal disease, “We affirm the moral obligation of our scientists to carry out this research on behalf of mankind and animals. Millions of Americans are alive today, and live healthier and more productive lives because our nation's health care professionals are able to employ safe and effective treatments including vaccines, surgical procedures, drug therapies and other valuable therapeutic methods developed with animal research.”. (www.umbc.edu) These advancements in the field of animal
Imagine being burned by a product without any expectation of the outcome being harmful. Reminisce on the time an abrupt injury occurred when it was not deserved. Visualize a shorter life expectancy because being added to a risky experiment was more vital than living. With all being said, I know