Animal Testing In Today's Society
Animal testing is a major debate in today’s society, but it is not just a problem of today. Animal testing dates back the 1800’s when Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory served to suggest that animals could serve as effective models to facilitate biological understanding in humans. Other cases of animal testing include psychological experiments such as the one by Ivan Pavlov in the late nineteenth century. He conducted experiments on dogs to demonstrate how dogs could be conditioned with regards to memory and repetitive tasks, but the first major reference to animal testing occurred in the late nineteenth century when Louis Pasteur gave anthrax to sheep and showed the importance of vaccines with his germ theory. (Murnaghan, Screen 1) Major
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It is argued that testing products on animals is cruel and inhumane. Animals go through procedures without anesthetic and are normally killed by breaking their necks or decapitating them. Animals are force fed, forced to inhale chemicals, exhausted from physical restraint, and sometimes starved of food and water. Researchers burn them and create boils, cuts, and other wounds, only to observe the healing process. People that agree with the methods of animal testing argue that animal’s lives are irrelevant compared to a human’s life and that they have a similar anatomy of a human being. It may be that chimpanzees share 99% of their DNA with humans, and mice are 98% genetically similar to humans but as “Paul Furlong, Professor of Clinical Neuroimaging at Aston University, says, "it's very hard to create an animal model that even equates closely to what we're trying to achieve in the human." Thomas Hartung, Professor of evidence-based toxicology at Johns Hopkins University, argues for alternatives to animal testing because "we are not 70 kg rats." (ProCon, Screen 1) Scientists believe that animals make better testing subjects due to their short life spans, which makes sense, but animal tests do not reliably predict results in
It is argued that testing products on animals is cruel and inhumane. Animals go through procedures without anesthetic and are normally killed by breaking their necks or decapitating them. Animals are force fed, forced to inhale chemicals, exhausted from physical restraint, and sometimes starved of food and water. Researchers burn them and create boils, cuts, and other wounds, only to observe the healing process. People that agree with the methods of animal testing argue that animal’s lives are irrelevant compared to a human’s life and that they have a similar anatomy of a human being. It may be that chimpanzees share 99% of their DNA with humans, and mice are 98% genetically similar to humans but as “Paul Furlong, Professor of Clinical Neuroimaging at Aston University, says, "it's very hard to create an animal model that even equates closely to what we're trying to achieve in the human." Thomas Hartung, Professor of evidence-based toxicology at Johns Hopkins University, argues for alternatives to animal testing because "we are not 70 kg rats." (ProCon, Screen 1) Scientists believe that animals make better testing subjects due to their short life spans, which makes sense, but animal tests do not reliably predict results in