Animal Testing in Psychological Research Is a Great Thing
Psychology
Journal #1
Word Count –
Animal Testing In the world of psychological research, using animals for research testing is a great thing. Scientist have developed and proven many theories through this research. For this journal assignment I read several articles on animal testing and was amazed at the things we as humans have gained through research. We developed cures for major forms of sickness including Tuberculosis, Meningitis, and Parkinson’s disease. As well as perfecting blood transfusions using pigs and the development of insulin using dogs which was later introduced to humans in 1922. So with all these great things coming from research testing on animals, why would people still have a problem with it? Some say it is inhumane to use animals for this but how many human lives would have been lost without the development of cures for some of the diseases mentioned above. Penicillin, which was developed from animal research testing, has saved over two hundred million lives since its discovery in 1928. I love animals just as much as the next person but the number of human lives that have been saved, in my opinion, outweigh the cons of animal testing. On the subject of “if animal testing is ethical or unethical” my opinion is not as strong, mainly because myself and most other people do not know exactly how the experiments are ran. According to the APA, scientists have a strict code of ethics that each must uphold when it comes to animals testing or they will lose their job; but how do we really know that these scientists are following these codes to a tee? We can only hope that each laboratory follows these strict guidelines. In psychological testing of animals, alternatives are being used more frequently in this day and time. A scientist can “use a computer to model a rat’s behavior” but prefer observing a live animal. A computer is not able to correctly calculate how the rat would react to certain environmental changes based solely on a few
Journal #1
Word Count –
Animal Testing In the world of psychological research, using animals for research testing is a great thing. Scientist have developed and proven many theories through this research. For this journal assignment I read several articles on animal testing and was amazed at the things we as humans have gained through research. We developed cures for major forms of sickness including Tuberculosis, Meningitis, and Parkinson’s disease. As well as perfecting blood transfusions using pigs and the development of insulin using dogs which was later introduced to humans in 1922. So with all these great things coming from research testing on animals, why would people still have a problem with it? Some say it is inhumane to use animals for this but how many human lives would have been lost without the development of cures for some of the diseases mentioned above. Penicillin, which was developed from animal research testing, has saved over two hundred million lives since its discovery in 1928. I love animals just as much as the next person but the number of human lives that have been saved, in my opinion, outweigh the cons of animal testing. On the subject of “if animal testing is ethical or unethical” my opinion is not as strong, mainly because myself and most other people do not know exactly how the experiments are ran. According to the APA, scientists have a strict code of ethics that each must uphold when it comes to animals testing or they will lose their job; but how do we really know that these scientists are following these codes to a tee? We can only hope that each laboratory follows these strict guidelines. In psychological testing of animals, alternatives are being used more frequently in this day and time. A scientist can “use a computer to model a rat’s behavior” but prefer observing a live animal. A computer is not able to correctly calculate how the rat would react to certain environmental changes based solely on a few