animal rights Essays

In our ever-changing world the race to find the best technological advancements has never been higher. Progress within the medical field has changed drastically in the last 50 years. “Health is driven by the technologies that cure the unhealthy. These technologies need to advance along with an advancing society. In the last five decades new and improved, less expensive, medicine has been produced” (Leonard). Behind all this advanced medicine are the technologies, or creatures, that are used to test and improve the medicine. Animals are used to test the drugs and medicine that are in route to be produced for human use. “The term "Animal Testing" refers to procedures performed on living animals for purposes of research into basic biology and diseases, assessing the effectiveness of new medicinal products” (Humane Society). There are people who side with, and agree that animal testing improves the lives of humans, and there are individuals who believe the harm this research brings to animals is unreasonable and can be prevented.

“It is a simple fact that many, if not most, of today’s modern medical miracles would not exist if experimental animals had not been available to medical scientists. It is equally a fact that, should we as a society decide the use of animal subjects is ethically unacceptable and therefore must be stopped, medical progress will slow to a snail’s pace. Such retardation will in itself have a huge ethical ‘price tag’ in terms of continued human and animal suffering from problems such as diabetes, cancer, degenerative cardiovascular diseases, and so forth.”

Animal testing is crucial because without it, scientists might never find developments for biomedical research. Worldwide, there are millions of diseases that create devastation in countless families. However, there are vaccines, cures, and processes that scientists have came up with to help fix this problem. How fast and efficiently they come up with these treatments is the difference in many lives saved. Animal testing has been proven to speed up the process of collecting research

Animals play a very significant role in medical advancements for human’s sake. Medical researches usually use monkeys as they are popularly known as nonhuman primates (NHPs). This method is used because NHPs has countless similarities to mankind especially in physiology, neuroanatomy, reproduction, development, cognition, and social complexity. Sample of animal research who won a Nobel Prize in 1954 were John F. Enders, Thomas H. Weller, and Frederick C. Robbins. They developed the technique of taking the kidney directly from monkeys and culturing it in the test tube. These cell cultures were then used by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin on giving cure to polio virus. This is now a vaccine called poliomyelitis. More and more researchers employed monkeys as tests. Without this procedure, there will be no cure for Hepatitis-B and possible treatments of Parkinson’s disease. Moreover, there are aggressive brain experiments conducted in University of Utah, University of California-Scan

Animals that are put forward to medical experimentation contribute to cures and treatments that have saved many lives. The California Biomedical Research Association states that “nearly every medical breakthrough in the last 100 years has resulted directly from research using animals.” (California Biomedical Research Association). Animals that are used for these tests have contributed incredible discoveries on unimaginable areas starting on Cancer, HIV/AIDS, Heart Disease/Stroke, Diabetes, Birth Defects, and Spinal Cord Injuries. Animal testing has made medical discoveries to go from antibiotics to blood transfusions, from

Scientists use animals in order to make medical advancements to help humans however, it is often difficult to get the same results in both animals and humans. The biology of humans and animals is not the same, although there are some similarities. According to Akhtar, in an article titled “The Flaws and Human Harms of Animal Experimentation”, “Annually, more than 115 million animals are used worldwide in experimentation or to supply the biomedical industry” (Akhtar). Millions of animals are used, against their will, to try to help humans. Although there are some instances in which the experiments have helped humans, is it really worth the pain and suffering that all of those animals have had to suffer. Akhtar also stated “Although it is widely accepted that medicine should be evidence based, animal experimentation as a means of informing human health has generally not been held, in practice, to this standard” (Akhtar). There has been some cases in which testing medicine on animals has benefitted humans, however this type of result is hard to duplicate. Often when a result is achieved in the lab, there are many influences that can cause these

Animal research has contributed to over 70% of Nobel prizes for physiology or medicine. Since our genes are closer to the animals tested for medicine it makes it easier to test if the medicine will

Research on living animals has been practiced since at least 500 BC. An estimated 26 million animals are used every year in the United States for scientific and commercial testing. The use of animals for scientific testing should not continue because animal testing can be cruel, some animals aren’t protected by law, and there are alternative testing methods.

Animals are living systems available for scientists to test their new medicines and treatments (Parks 6). This testing can be done without harming any humans… at least at first. However as these medicines move on to human trials, which all medicines must before they are available to the public, they can give a false sense of safety ("Animal Testing is"). For example, a sleeping pill named Thalidomide produced zero birth defects when tested on pregnant animals but when it passed on to human trials it caused birth defects in over 10,000 human babies (“16 Integral Pros”). Another reason scientists use animals is because they are biologically similar to humans (Yashiki). Although animals may only have a few biological differences, usually these differences are significant when comparing reactions to drugs from species to species (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). Primates are often used in testing since they are considered very similar to humans but they are still unable to accurately predict human reactions to drugs 100% of the time (Yashiki). C. Ray Greek had an interesting thought on this, he talks about how scientists defend testing on chimps “because they share 99% of our genes, I say that is a fallacious argument. We share 58% of our genes with bananas and no one is testing heart disease on bananas,” (qtd in Parks 30). However, it all comes back to one reason, tradition. Animal testing has been

Apart from humans, animal testing is not just used to benefit people, but animals themselves benefit from the research that is gathered. Under the skin animals are very similar to humans, so animals too suffer from many of the same diseases. "Illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, asthma and malaria are suffered by many species and can be treated in much the same way" (RDS-net.org 1). Animals benefit much from treatments and medicines that had been initially developed for humans, such examples are antibiotics, anesthetics, antiparasitics, and insulin for diabetes. The fact is that nearly ninety percent of veterinary medicines in use today are either similar or very similar to those developed to treat humans. Even diagnostic techniques such as scanners and surgery practices that are used to remove tumors and

Throughout time, using animals as test subjects has been beneficial in finding numerous cures and treatments for patients with diseases and other health complications. According to the California Biomedical Research Association “ Nearly every medical breakthrough in the last 100 years has resulted directly from research using animals”. The discovery of insulin, where pancreases where removed from dogs during this experiment, saved lives of those who are diabetic. Director of the University of Texas M.D Anderson Cancer Center’s animal research facility, Chris Abee states, “We wouldn’t have a vaccine for hepatitis B without chimpanzees and

Animals commonly used in medical research are rats and chimpanzees. Over time these species have proven to be plentiful and they have exhibited the ability to sustain the various testing

In the medical field, animals are used for everything including basic understanding of human biology and further research in drug and vaccine development (Animal Justice 2015). Since the beginnings of medicine, animals are used as models in the medical field and has led to the existence of many types of cures and treatments to treat ailments that are available for humans’ usage now. Aristotle and Erasistratus are the early Greek physician scientists who carried out experiments on live animals (Hajar 2011). In UK, the use of animals in the medical field started with Harvey’s experiments on different types of animals to demonstrate the process of blood circulation (Understanding Animal Research n.d.). The development of medical science cause the numbers of animals used in research to increase steadily over the late 19th and the 20th centuries.

Poliovirus is a contagious infection that rampaged through the United States about fifty years ago, with the possibility of leading to lifetime paralysis. In the 1950s, Jonas Salk and his team developed a polio vaccine that prevented the outbreak of polio (“Polio Vaccine”). During his pursuit of the creation of the vaccine, mice, monkeys and rats were used to test the side effects and effectiveness of the new vaccine. Without it, polio would have become a worldwide malady. Animal testing is the procedure of using various animals to research for new drugs, vaccines or cosmetics. However, there are many opponents against animal testing on the basis that it is unethical and that it is harmful to the subjects of the research. Nonetheless,

Most of the animals used for research are rats, mice, and hamsters. Sometimes dogs, cats, goats, monkeys, and rabbits are also used. For decades animal research has been misused. Although some researchers have achieved medical advances, there should be other means of research. Testing on animals is cruel, inhumane, and often unnecessary.