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Essay on Should Animal Experimentation Ever Be Permitted?

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Physicians are known to have performed vivisection on animals for hundreds of years, and nowadays animal testing remains an essential element of research in medicine and pharmacology. Animal experimentation has generated heated discussions among scientists, philosophers, and politicians. This issue is very controversial, since it involves ethical questions. While it is generally accepted that testing cosmetics on animals is unnecessary and immoral, there is a debate concerning the use of animals for medical purposes. Our society is split into supporters and opponents of animal experimentation. The latter tend to resort to violent methods of protest, namely they intimidate physicians involved in animal testing, etc. Whereas proponents of …show more content…

In many countries throughout the world testing drugs on animals is legal. In fact, medications and other substances like household chemicals will not reach the market unless they are tested and proved to be safe for consumers (ILAR 21). Thus, animal testing is crucially important for exploring maladies and evaluating the safety of medications.
People who disapprove of use of animals as research models frequently appeal to cases when the results of animal testing turned out to be unreliable. It cannot be denied that sometimes treatments approved after animal experimentation are ineffective or even harmful for people. However, it is impossible to ban animal testing only because of these instances, since such errors occur rarely as compared with the number of lifesaving medications that appear as a result of animal research. The examples given below will help to understand the significance of vivisection on animals. There is a long list of illnesses which can be cured today due to animal experimentation. For example, diabetes, appendicitis, diphtheria are successfully treated nowadays as a result of experiments involving animals (Loeb et al. 2716). Antibiotics, which treat bacterial infections, drugs to reduce depression and treat cancer, insulin, open-heart surgery, and medications, which reduce cholesterol in blood, have evolved from animal experimentation (Watson 30).

A number of medical advances achieved through

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