Argumentative Essay: Animal Testing Is Ethical
Jeff Howell
Dr. Amico
English comp 2
11-7-14
Animal testing There is a long history of experimentation on animals, especially in the medical and cosmetic professions. Many people argue that humanity and science would not be where anywhere near where it is today if it were not for animal experimentation However, with advancements in medical and scientific technology, animal testing is no longer a defensible practice. It is no longer cost effective to test on animals and it also is morally wrong to force another being to test something with no say. So there needs to be laws in place to not allow companies to test animals, especially in such harsh ways like they do now. It is a very serious thing because animals are being treated wrongly, and …show more content…
while people think in the past it was necessary to cure diseases and test new drugs, the advances in technology have cause it to be a very obsolete way to go about it. I plan on having people who can vote have a law passed that allows for the illegalization of all animal testing. There haven’t really been any other attempts to stop animal testing, other than the movement that within the last year they have stopped testing on apes. The people I am going to be trying to persuade will be voters. Voters are from ages 18 and older, so this demographic is most of society. Society as a whole is starting to give more meaning to everything, and is more sentimental than previously. I am going to appeal to the emotion and also the logical side and show people that animal testing is out of date financially and also causes so much harm to animals. This will cause people to understand that animal testing is a poor way to go about findings things out about new drugs. The new law of no animal testing will appeal to them because it will give them a peace of mind that animals are no longer being hurt.
My solution to animal testing is to get rid of it completely with new laws that will have strict repercussions to companies that test animals. This will save people money because animal testing is very expensive, and it will also save the animals the trouble of being tested. The way they are treated is horrible, and it is not fair at all to animals that they must be tested on, especially with the new advances in technology. It will fully solve the problem of animal testing since they will no longer be tested on.
The costs of this wouldn’t be as great as people would expect due to the new ways technology has been capable of testing new products. Scientists in Europe are close to creating a replica system of human organs to test their new drugs on. They also have already created an almost exact replica of human skin to test makeup on, and they are phasing out using chimps and apes for testing, so why not all animals? It might take a bit of work at first to get used to not having animals to test on, but it certainly could work and science would not be set back. It would also be cheaper to not test on animals because the cost of testing animals, housing them, and feeding them is very high.
With the new law of no more animal testing animal testing animals will no longer have to go through the pain and suffering of being tested on and put through so much. Animal experimentation is a very abusive method of finding the required information on certain drugs and other things they test animals on. Poor regulation about the procedures that can be done to animals allows for abusive experiments. Abuse is allowed in research because the only U.S. law that governs the use of animals in laboratories, the Animal Welfare Act, allows animals to be burned, shocked, poisoned, isolated, starved, forcibly restrained, addicted to drugs, and brain-damaged. According to Andre Claire and Manuel Velasquez “95% of animals used in experiments are not protected by the federal Animal Welfare Act, which excludes birds, rats and mice bred for research, and cold-blooded animals such as reptiles and most fish.” So now even with the laws in place most animals are not covered. These methods are undeniably abusive and cruel, and if people knew more about the way animals are treated they would be appalled. In Practical Ethics, Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher, said “the question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?”. Singer then states that “defenders of experiments on animals do not deny that animals suffer. They cannot deny the animals’ suffering because they need to stress the similarities between humans and other animals in order to claim that their experiments may have some relevance for human purposes. According to Matt Rossell, who formerly worked for Eliot Spindel, a medical researcher in the field of the effects of consumption of nicotine, pregnant monkeys were “subjected to multiple surgeries to implant nicotine pumps in their backs and their babies are cut out of their wombs to dissect their lungs. Rossell continued by saying that he “‘witnessed some of the mothers post-surgery with the same signs of clinical depression that women suffer from after going through the emotional tragedy of losing a stillborn baby’". Willingly forcing distress and pain on an animal who is capable of feeling pain is cruel. Spindel’s experiments are just one example of cruel treatment of animals in testing. An article was published by Michigan University that said that annually “An estimated eight million animals are used in painful experiments. Reports show that at least ten percent of these animals do not receive painkillers”. That means that 800,000 animals are going through painful tests without painkillers to help them through, which is an unreasonable number that should not be happening.
Finally, animal experimentation is an outdated method. Much of the developed world has deemed animal testing unnecessary. A complete ban on the sale of cosmetics developed through animal testing has taken effect in the European Union. The ban applies to all new cosmetics and their ingredients sold in the European Union, regardless of where in the world testing on animals was carried out. The 27 EU countries have had a ban on such tests in place since 2009. But the EU Commission is now asking the EU 's trading partners to do the same. Essentially, the vast majority of Europeans deemed animal testing unnecessary and undesirable. As of yet, the ban enacted in 2009 has not hindered the continual development of Europe, and European women can still wear safe, good-quality makeup if they so choose. Transitioning from the cosmetic industry to the medical industry. This is influencing other countries such as Australia, Japan, and the E.U. to ban and limit experiments on great apes in medical research. Additionally, because other methods have been deemed better, the National Institutes of Health announced that it is “phasing out experiments on chimpanzees”. These changes, presently limited to great apes, seem to point in the direction that the medical field will go.
Many viable alternatives to animal testing exist.
Much of the world is abandoning the use of animal experimentation, but the discontinued use of this method of research and testing will not leave the medical and scientific realm without ways to discover new items or verify data and safety of products. Effective, affordable, and humane research methods include sophisticated in vitro, genomic, and computer-modeling techniques as well as studies of human populations, volunteers, and patients. According to Popular Science article “From Chimp to Chip,” by Erin Biba, institutions have created, or are developing, tissue and organ models on chips that effectively model human reactions. Additionally, alternative methods of research tend to be cheaper than animal experimentation because they don’t require purchasing, housing, feeding, and maintaining living creatures. The existence of these methods makes any need for animal testing obsolete.
Animal testing is something that shouldn’t be happening in this day and age, and people should not be backing companies that use animals to test their products. The costs would be less, due to the high price of testing on animals, animals wouldn’t have to go through the struggles of being tested on, and science could still be just as good without testing animals. These reasons are why I am calling for everyone who can vote to get in touch with your representatives to try and get an animal testing law on a ballot and allow for everyone to vote and say animal testing shouldn’t
happen.
Works Cited
Andre, Claire and Manuel Velasquez. “Of Cures and Creatures Great and Small.” Issues in Ethics. V. 1, N. 3 (1988) Nov 1, 2014
“Alternatives to Animal Testing.” PETA. Web. Nov 1, 2014
Biba, Erin. “From Chimp to Chip.” Popular Science Dec. 2013: 14, Print.
“EU Bans Sale of All Animal-tested Cosmetics.” BBC News. 11 March 2013. Web. Nov 1, 2014
Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. 19 Pippin, John. “Put Animal Testing to Sleep: Pro: Misleading Conclusions, Wasted Money.” Bloomberg Business Week. Web. Nov 1, 2014. 75. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Print.
Dr. Amico
English comp 2
11-7-14
Animal testing There is a long history of experimentation on animals, especially in the medical and cosmetic professions. Many people argue that humanity and science would not be where anywhere near where it is today if it were not for animal experimentation However, with advancements in medical and scientific technology, animal testing is no longer a defensible practice. It is no longer cost effective to test on animals and it also is morally wrong to force another being to test something with no say. So there needs to be laws in place to not allow companies to test animals, especially in such harsh ways like they do now. It is a very serious thing because animals are being treated wrongly, and …show more content…
while people think in the past it was necessary to cure diseases and test new drugs, the advances in technology have cause it to be a very obsolete way to go about it. I plan on having people who can vote have a law passed that allows for the illegalization of all animal testing. There haven’t really been any other attempts to stop animal testing, other than the movement that within the last year they have stopped testing on apes. The people I am going to be trying to persuade will be voters. Voters are from ages 18 and older, so this demographic is most of society. Society as a whole is starting to give more meaning to everything, and is more sentimental than previously. I am going to appeal to the emotion and also the logical side and show people that animal testing is out of date financially and also causes so much harm to animals. This will cause people to understand that animal testing is a poor way to go about findings things out about new drugs. The new law of no animal testing will appeal to them because it will give them a peace of mind that animals are no longer being hurt.
My solution to animal testing is to get rid of it completely with new laws that will have strict repercussions to companies that test animals. This will save people money because animal testing is very expensive, and it will also save the animals the trouble of being tested. The way they are treated is horrible, and it is not fair at all to animals that they must be tested on, especially with the new advances in technology. It will fully solve the problem of animal testing since they will no longer be tested on.
The costs of this wouldn’t be as great as people would expect due to the new ways technology has been capable of testing new products. Scientists in Europe are close to creating a replica system of human organs to test their new drugs on. They also have already created an almost exact replica of human skin to test makeup on, and they are phasing out using chimps and apes for testing, so why not all animals? It might take a bit of work at first to get used to not having animals to test on, but it certainly could work and science would not be set back. It would also be cheaper to not test on animals because the cost of testing animals, housing them, and feeding them is very high.
With the new law of no more animal testing animal testing animals will no longer have to go through the pain and suffering of being tested on and put through so much. Animal experimentation is a very abusive method of finding the required information on certain drugs and other things they test animals on. Poor regulation about the procedures that can be done to animals allows for abusive experiments. Abuse is allowed in research because the only U.S. law that governs the use of animals in laboratories, the Animal Welfare Act, allows animals to be burned, shocked, poisoned, isolated, starved, forcibly restrained, addicted to drugs, and brain-damaged. According to Andre Claire and Manuel Velasquez “95% of animals used in experiments are not protected by the federal Animal Welfare Act, which excludes birds, rats and mice bred for research, and cold-blooded animals such as reptiles and most fish.” So now even with the laws in place most animals are not covered. These methods are undeniably abusive and cruel, and if people knew more about the way animals are treated they would be appalled. In Practical Ethics, Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher, said “the question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?”. Singer then states that “defenders of experiments on animals do not deny that animals suffer. They cannot deny the animals’ suffering because they need to stress the similarities between humans and other animals in order to claim that their experiments may have some relevance for human purposes. According to Matt Rossell, who formerly worked for Eliot Spindel, a medical researcher in the field of the effects of consumption of nicotine, pregnant monkeys were “subjected to multiple surgeries to implant nicotine pumps in their backs and their babies are cut out of their wombs to dissect their lungs. Rossell continued by saying that he “‘witnessed some of the mothers post-surgery with the same signs of clinical depression that women suffer from after going through the emotional tragedy of losing a stillborn baby’". Willingly forcing distress and pain on an animal who is capable of feeling pain is cruel. Spindel’s experiments are just one example of cruel treatment of animals in testing. An article was published by Michigan University that said that annually “An estimated eight million animals are used in painful experiments. Reports show that at least ten percent of these animals do not receive painkillers”. That means that 800,000 animals are going through painful tests without painkillers to help them through, which is an unreasonable number that should not be happening.
Finally, animal experimentation is an outdated method. Much of the developed world has deemed animal testing unnecessary. A complete ban on the sale of cosmetics developed through animal testing has taken effect in the European Union. The ban applies to all new cosmetics and their ingredients sold in the European Union, regardless of where in the world testing on animals was carried out. The 27 EU countries have had a ban on such tests in place since 2009. But the EU Commission is now asking the EU 's trading partners to do the same. Essentially, the vast majority of Europeans deemed animal testing unnecessary and undesirable. As of yet, the ban enacted in 2009 has not hindered the continual development of Europe, and European women can still wear safe, good-quality makeup if they so choose. Transitioning from the cosmetic industry to the medical industry. This is influencing other countries such as Australia, Japan, and the E.U. to ban and limit experiments on great apes in medical research. Additionally, because other methods have been deemed better, the National Institutes of Health announced that it is “phasing out experiments on chimpanzees”. These changes, presently limited to great apes, seem to point in the direction that the medical field will go.
Many viable alternatives to animal testing exist.
Much of the world is abandoning the use of animal experimentation, but the discontinued use of this method of research and testing will not leave the medical and scientific realm without ways to discover new items or verify data and safety of products. Effective, affordable, and humane research methods include sophisticated in vitro, genomic, and computer-modeling techniques as well as studies of human populations, volunteers, and patients. According to Popular Science article “From Chimp to Chip,” by Erin Biba, institutions have created, or are developing, tissue and organ models on chips that effectively model human reactions. Additionally, alternative methods of research tend to be cheaper than animal experimentation because they don’t require purchasing, housing, feeding, and maintaining living creatures. The existence of these methods makes any need for animal testing obsolete.
Animal testing is something that shouldn’t be happening in this day and age, and people should not be backing companies that use animals to test their products. The costs would be less, due to the high price of testing on animals, animals wouldn’t have to go through the struggles of being tested on, and science could still be just as good without testing animals. These reasons are why I am calling for everyone who can vote to get in touch with your representatives to try and get an animal testing law on a ballot and allow for everyone to vote and say animal testing shouldn’t
happen.
Works Cited
Andre, Claire and Manuel Velasquez. “Of Cures and Creatures Great and Small.” Issues in Ethics. V. 1, N. 3 (1988) Nov 1, 2014
“Alternatives to Animal Testing.” PETA. Web. Nov 1, 2014
Biba, Erin. “From Chimp to Chip.” Popular Science Dec. 2013: 14, Print.
“EU Bans Sale of All Animal-tested Cosmetics.” BBC News. 11 March 2013. Web. Nov 1, 2014
Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. 19 Pippin, John. “Put Animal Testing to Sleep: Pro: Misleading Conclusions, Wasted Money.” Bloomberg Business Week. Web. Nov 1, 2014. 75. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Print.