Can you imagine being locked in a cage waiting in fear for the next painful procedure? More than 100 million animals suffer and die in the United States each year from animal testing. Animals are locked in cages and tortured, which leads to the development of neurotic behavior. Animal testing is a serious issue that has faced almost the entire world. Many animals are harmed and treated unfairly for experiments that end with wasteful results. It is unreliable, wasteful, and dangerous. There are many alternatives that can replace animal testing to help preserve these harmless animals. Animal testing should be discontinued to help save the lives of harmless animals.
Animal testing can be considered unreliable. 95% of drugs fail in human trials despite promising results in animal tests, whether on safety grounds or because they do
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One alternative is Micro dosing, the administering of doses too small to cause adverse reactions, can be used in human volunteers, whose blood is then analyzed. This method enables human volunteers to be safely substituted for animals in some drug tests. It involves giving humans doses of a drug high enough to cause cellular effects, but too low to affect the entire body. It is considered only Phase 0 of a clinical drug trial, the earliest phase; animal testing with the full dose of a drug is needed to determine its safety and efficacy and for drug approval.
Another alternative to animal testing is In vitro (in glass) testing, such as studying cell cultures in a petri dish. It can produce more relevant results than animal testing because human cells can be used. Cells or tissue samples are taken from animals or humans and prepared for laboratory study. Scientists then apply drugs or products to the artificial human-like skin and see how it reacts. In vitrotechniques focus on the cellular level and therefore cannot replace whole-body
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.
Animal testing does not accurately predict possible reactions humans might have to animal tested drugs or cosmetics. ProCon.org says that 94% of drugs successful in animal testing fail during human trials. A drug released in 1999, called Vioxx, was tested and showed a positive effect on the hearts of mice, but ended up causing 27,000 heart attacks and cardiac deaths before being withdrawn from the market. A study by The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS, observed inflammatory conditions in ill humans, and experimented with 150 drugs, all of which were successful in animal tests, and found that none of them were successful in humans. A reason why animal testing is so inaccurate is because humans are very different. Despite having similar DNA to several animals, humans and animal test subjects differ in bone structure, organ size, and react in different ways to drugs that have been tested on animals. Paul Furlong, Professor of Clinical Neuroimaging at Aston University, said that "it's very hard to create an animal model that even equates closely to what we're trying to achieve in the human.” With 94% of our drugs failing during human tests, Furlong is, with no doubt, correct. Thomas Hartung, Professor of evidence-based toxicology at Johns Hopkins University also stated that “we are not 70 kg rats.” A final failure in the accuracy of animal tested drugs is that because animal
To begin with, navs.org tells us that humans differ from animals in various ways, animal models will never be able to accurately recapitulate what happens in the human condition. Due to humans differing animals in various ways, the results aren't always effective. Animals being tested on things that humans and animals differ from in basically just killing animals for no reason. Besides, articles.baltimoresun.com states that 90 percent of medications approved for human use after animal testing were later proved ineffective or harmful to humans in clinical trials. As a result, 90 percent of the tests done are ineffective and harmful to humans so there’s no point of doing animal tests. You could save thousands of animals by not doing tests on them. Since animal tests aren’t always effective, people should stop doing them and save the
Alternative testing methods now exist that can replace the need for animals. In vitro (in glass) testing, such as studying cell cultures in a petri dish, can produce more relevant results than animal testing because human cells can be used. [15] Microdosing, the administering of doses too small to cause adverse reactions, can be used in human volunteers, whose blood is then analyzed. Artificial human skin, such as the commercially available products EpiDerm and ThinCert, is made from sheets of human skin cells grown in test tubes or plastic wells and can produce more useful results than testing chemicals on animal skin. [15][50][51] Microfluidic chips ("organs on a chip"), which are lined with human cells and recreate the functions of human organs, are in advanced stages of development. Computer models, such as virtual reconstructions of human molecular structures, can predict the toxicity of substances without invasive experiments on animals. [50]
First, animal testing has not been proven accurate for converting drugs to human use. According to an article
Human tissue such as the surface of the skin has been proven to be a more reliable and accurate than tests on animals. The Lethal Dose 50 is the standard amount of toxicity which materials given to subjects in an experiment have, it is usually up to 50% fatal resulting in one half of all animals to die as a result. "The late Dr. Bjӧrn Ekwall (Cytotoxicology Laboratory in Sweden) developed a replacement for the LD50 test that measured toxicity at a precision rate of up to 85% accuracy compared to the LD50 rate of 61-65%" (Neaves). This experiment built and executed by the extraordinary cell toxicologist Dr. Bjon Ekwall consisted of a replica of the LD50 test which measured the toxicity rate of subjects much more accurately than the original. This experiment was performed on donated human tissue, not living animals. Not only is human skin and tissue capable of predicting more precise results, using human tissue would effectively determine whether a drug is safe for human organs or other important functions of the human body. Tests on living animals may never reveal those types of effects because by the time the effects can start to show, the animals are murdered by the other chemicals injected into their bodies or of physical decay. Although the obvious alternative to animal testing is testing humans, another possible alternative is the
Animals are different from humans therefore the results will be inaccurate. Just because a drug passes animal testing doesn't mean that
First, the reaction to drugs in animals bodies are different from the reaction in humans. When testing on animals it puts pressure on the animal and can give them a heart attack which leads
Animal testing is performed every year on millions of animals for the purpose of research into the effectiveness of drugs and treatment for diseases. Many of the animals that get tested vary from a wide range of rodents, to primates, to household pets such as cats and dogs. Today, general testing on animals are cruel, expensive, and generally inapplicable to humans. The world’s most innovative scientists have developed new methods for studying diseases which are safer alternatives for humans than animal testing. Animal testing must be stopped because of the negative consequences it creates. For one, by ending animal testing the U.S could save around 3 trillion dollars a year that are spent on testing alone. In addition, many animals could be set free from the suffering and physical discomfort that they endure while being subjects of human testing. Finally, if animal testing were to be stopped, then scientists could focus on testing that correlates better to human physiology. Experimentation using animals persists not because it’s the best science, but because of archaic habits, resistance to change, and a lack of outreach and education.
How do you think all of the life saving medications were tested to see if they worked? The answer is animal testing. Animal testing is still necessary and should continue being used today. By using this method researchers are able to treat many diseases for not only humans but animals as well. To keep the process more humane, scientists follow strict guidelines for all the animals included in the Animal Welfare Act. Without animal testing many diseases wouldn’t have been cured and people and animals would still be dying of them.
Knowing that in many cases animal tests have not produced stable or even capable results to put into effect on humans this allows for a large waste of money, time, and resources that could have been better well spent in furthering technological advances made for human relevant testing. Scientists have developed more modern and effective research methods that do not include animals. New technologies such as human-based micro dosing, or in vitro testing, act as human-patient simulators. These newly produced advancements along with sophisticated computer modeling allow for much faster and cheaper tests. Human-based micro dosing allows for more accurate results than animal testing. These experiments using in vitro or human-based micro dosing allows for experiments to be performed in non-unethical or inhumane manners.
However, researchers argue that because there are no laboratory alternatives that can replicate the complex biology of human beings, testing on living organisms is necessary (Animal Experimentation). Advances in technology may mean that this is no longer true. Funded by PETA, new methods such as Vitro, tests that use human cells and tissues, Silico models, and advanced computer-modeling techniques are being developed to replace animal testing (PETA). Unhindered by the many differences in species, “These models can accurately predict the ways that new drugs will react in the human body and replace the use of animals in exploratory research and many standard drug tests” (PETA). These technological advances in research make it no longer necessary or desirable to conduct expensive and time consuming experiments on animals whose results are inapplicable to humans
Using helpless animals for the benefit of human beings goes back thousands of years. A common theme has been present: the use of these animals has been necessary for survival. Of late, these essential sacrifices have metamorphosed into yield-less speculations. Animal testing is wrong based on these premises: there are available alternatives to direct testing on live animals, the results acquired rom the tests are inaccurate and repetitive, and ultimately it is speciesism, which is comparable to racism and sexism. Today’s society has progressed in other aspects, it is time for in-obligatory animal testing to be abolished. Cruelty to animals is inexcusable, avoidable and thoroughly repelling.
In vitro testing is one of alternatives to animal testing; this method has generally spent much more costly than small or medium scales of animal testing. In addition, with the current level of technology levels, in vitro testing is too limited to test the amount of experiments. Another alternative is research with human volunteers. This method has called “Microdosing”. This method is actual medical and scientific research with a human. However, this method is spent many times to get results and it spent the amount of budget to the test. Since there are many problems with these alternatives animal testing is the best way of doing biological
Today, there are many non-animal methods which have replaced animal experimentation and have been accepted by some countries as replacements for an existing animal test. Generally, non-animal tests are faster and less expensive than animal tests because they can