Against Animal Testing

*95% of animals used for experiments are not protected by the Animal Welfare Act, the only act governing animal testing. Laws protecting animals need to include test animals used for experiments and these laws should be more strongly enforced. In order to minimize the number of animals used for testing and make sure they are not mistreated, the laws need to make it harder for researchers to use animals, making alternatives more appealing.
Many people would agree that animal testing is morally wrong. As animal rights activist Justin Goodman puts it, "Mice are like us in all the ways that matter, so they're used as stand-ins for humans - but the moral significance of those similarities is ignored." Chimpanzees share 99% of their DNA with humans,
and mice share 98%, so if they are so similar to humans, then why are people willing to experiment on them and not us? If you have ever gotten soap in your eyes, then you would know how painful it can be. The Draize eye test is meant to test the irritability of a product. It involves putting the product in a rabbit’s eyes and holding their eyelids open, often for days at a time so they cannot blink away the product. Animals are also allowed to be burned, starved, shocked, poisoned, brain damaged, and isolated. Not to mention that they are rarely given anesthesia. All of this on top of the psychological distress of living in a laboratory and being experimented on, which some animals do their whole life. Without laws protecting test animals, it is easy and legal for researchers to mistreat these animals. Revising the laws and strictly enforcing them can make it hard for them to mistreat the animals, and the practice of using animals for testing can die out.
Most experiments using animals are not fair tests and cannot provide accurate data.
In these experiments, there are tons of sources of error. They do not live in a human-like environment, instead they are confined and distressed. Secondly, researchers deliberately infect the animals with diseases they would not normally contract, after being healthy to begin with. Many drugs have varying results between different animals, and animals and humans. For example, penicillin kills guinea pigs, but does nothing to rabbits. According to the food and drug administration, 92% of drugs that pass animal tests fail human tests. Some chemicals that are harmful to animals are okay for humans, as well as the other way around. Animals are being sacrificed for experiments that don’t even have accurate or useful results. If the regulations for the environment test animals live in are enforced, it can reduce some of the factors that make an experiment not a fair
test.
The Animal Welfare Act is not enough to protect the animals. *Twenty five million animals are used for experiments every year. The act does not include rats, mice, fish, and birds, the animals most often used in testing, and it does not ban any experiments. It has not succeeded in enforcing the rules either. In 2009, 338 violations were found not to mention the violations that people got away with. Since the AWA doesn’t protect most test animals, researchers can harm these animals without violating the acts. And for the animals that are protected, they can violate the act easily because it is rarely enforced.
Many people would argue that If we do not test on animals, we will have to test on humans.
This is true, but it overlooks that someone will still have to be the first human to test the product regardless. The Food and Drug administration requires some testing, but there are alternatives that cost less and take less time, and are more accurate than animal testing. Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering has created “organs on chips” which are made with living human cells. These chips can replace animal testing in the future. Wyss researchers wrote on the organs-on-chips project page, "Clinical studies take years to complete and testing a single compound can cost more than $2 million. Meanwhile, innumerable animal lives are lost, and the process often fails to predict human responses." In conclusion, in order to end animal testing, it needs to be harder to violate the Animal Welfare Act and more appealing to consider alternatives. I wish to end with a quote by Professor Charles R. Magel, “Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: ‘Because they are like us,’ ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: ‘Because the animals are not like
us.’”