animal testing research paper

Background & Thesis Poisoning, shocking, burning, and killing animals is all in a day's work for vivisectors A vivisector is someone who performs medical research on a live subject. If these atrocious acts were committed outside laboratories, they would be felonies. But animals suffer and die every day in laboratories with little or no protection from cruelty. Cruelty involving an innocent animal is a sensitive subject to most of us. In the words of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, animals in experimentation are subject to conditions that cause them to suffer from “pain and distress’. The U. S Law requires that scientists administer painkillers to the animals tested, as long as the medicine doesn’t interrupt the experiment. However mice, rats and birds make up ninety percent of the animals tested and are exempt from that requirement (“Update: Animal Testing”). To the law animals are a property. They are goods to be bought and sold, acquired and maintained. Animals are living, breathing creatures that have feelings and require a necessary habitat that should be respected. Estimates exist that state one hundred million animals are used for experimentation world wide per year, which is about 274,000 per day, or three every second (“Vivisection”). Rats, mice, guinea pigs, dogs, monkeys and rabbits are just a few of the types of animals used by companies and universities to test the safety of drugs and other newly developed products. These animals come from “factory farms” and are sometimes genetically modified or given specific diseases before birth. Their short lives are spent in small metal cages causing many animals, especially monkeys, to have severe psychological issues (“Update: Animal Testing”). The U. S. Foundation for Biomedical Research says that, “Animal testing has played a vital role in virtually every major medical advance of the last century- for both animal and human health. The three main research groups that use animals for testing are