Argument Against Animal Testing

I. Unethical
a. Animals cannot give their consent to be a test subject.
b. Animals have feelings that aren’t recognizable.
c. Robin Williams passed and the Gorilla he had been working with named Kok, became depressed. After learning sign language, Kok signed the word crying showing how sad she was by the death of Robin Williams.
d. Many animals are tortured with burns, forced to accept these drugs with unknown results, and restrained for long periods of times.
e. Animal testing is immoral and even outlawed in some countries.
[Transition Although there are laws and acts passed to protect these animals, they aren’t always enforced.]
II. Animal Welfare Act
a. The act was passed in the year of 1966, but is not enforced as much as it should be.
b. The only animals protected under this law are dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs, or any warm blooded animal. Every other animal is vulnerable to these experiments.
c. There have been reports of monkeys, specifically Chimpanzees being tested on still, even after the act is in place.
d. It is as if the act doesn’t exist which is why the procedure should be completely shut down.
[Transition Not only are they morally wrong, but they are also very expensive.]
III. Expensive
a. Many tests are much more expensive because of the amount of care the animals need.
b. They need money in order to feed them to keep them alive until the test is over and need to provide them with shelter and other day to day needs.
[Transition Many people of faith also believe it is wrong to mistreat animals]
IV. Religious traditions
a. There are many Religions that also believe animals deserve to be treated a certain way it has an impact on that aspect as well.
b. The Hindu doctrine states that you should not harm other living beings.
c. Buddhists believes in not doing anything to harm animals.
d. In the bible it states “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.”
[Transition The data retrieved from these results don’t necessarily mean they can be applied to humans]
V. Animals and Humans aren’t exactly the same
a. Sheree Stachura who has a Bachelor of Science and Nursing states the following:
b. “Animal tests and human results are the same only 5% to 25% of the time. Eighty-eight percent of doctors agreed that animal experiments can be misleading because of how different they are.”
c. “There are many things different between an animal and a human in the aspect of the anatomic, cellular, and metabolic.”
d. “More recently, the drug Vioxx was withdrawn from the market. It was manufactured to be an anti-inflammatory medication. It passed animal studies on mice, rats, and African green monkeys.The medication was withdrawn in the fall of 2004. The drug caused cardiac and vascular disease when used in humans. It is estimated that as many as 60,000 Americans have died from the drug and that more than 100,000 Americans have been injured”
e. “Chloramphenicol, an antibiotic, was safe in animal testing but caused irreversible damage to the bone marrow of humans.”
f. “Encainide and flecainide were found safe when tested on animals, and when given to humans, they caused heart attack and death”
g. “Only 1.16% of human illnesses are seen in animals”
[Tranistion One example of a test, is the LD50 experiment.]
VI. LD50
a.
Marjorie Sun wrote, “Since the late 1920’s, scientists have killed millions of animals to conduct the test, which was designed to help judge the acute toxicity of drugs, pesticides, and other chemicals.”
b. It has become a bigger issue that many are noticing. A couple of years ago there were 16 congressmen who wrote a letter to agencies about their concern with testing.
c. These test require a large number of animals at a time such as 50 to 120 to conduct their testing.
d. Their tests kill up to 50 percent of their animals they test on which has shown how dangerous this is for the animals and how it should be stopped.
[Transition Animal testing is not essential when trying to advance medically; there are other alternatives.]
VII. Alternate testing procedures
a. Microdosing is when a person takes small doses of a substance as a test to see if it would work. This only has an effect on their cellular perspective which doesn’t affect their major organ systems.
b. Huh, Dongeun, Geraldine A Hamilton, and Donald E Ingber, who are biomedical engineers state, “[Organs on chips] could potentially serve as replacements for animals used in drug development and toxin testing.”
c. Computer models are available that display human molecular structures which can predict the toxicity of the
drugs.