Animal Testing - Essay 1

Animal Testing Using Animals for testing is wrong and should be banned. They should be entitled to the rights we have. Every day humans are using defenseless animals for cruel and most often useless tests. The animals cannot fight for themselves therefore we must. There should be stronger laws to protect them from laboratory experiments. Although private companies run most labs, experiments are often conducted by public organizations. The U.S. government, the Army and Air Force in particular, has designed and conducted many animal experiments. The experiments were engineered so that many animals would suffer and die without any certainty that this suffering and death would save a single life, or benefit humans in any way at all. An example of this is some tens of thousands of Beagles experimented with. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, 64 Beagles were forced to inhale radioactive Strontium 90 as part of a "Fission Product Inhalation Program" which has been paid for by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. In this experiment 26 dogs died. One of the deaths occurred during an epileptic seizure; another from brain hemorrhage. Other dogs, before death, became feverish and anemic, lost their appetites, and had hemorrhages. The experimenters compared their results to those experiments conducted at the University of Utah and the Argonne National Laboratory in which beagles were injected with Strontium 90. They concluded that the dose needed to produce "early death" in fifty percent of the sample group differed from test to test because the dogs injected with Strontium 90 retain more of the radioactive substance than dogs forced to inhale it. Also, at the University of Rochester School of Medicine a group of experimenters put fifty beagles in wooden boxes and tested them with different levels of radiation by x-rays. Twenty-one of the dogs died within the first two weeks. The irritated dogs suffered vomiting, diarrhea, and lost their appetites. Later, they hemorrhaged from