Persuasive Essay Against Animal Testing
Animal Testing, Life Wasting
Today, a much debated topic is whether animals should be used in medical experiments or not. Supporters, including professors, and research scientists in laboratory medicine, believe that using animals as experimental subjects is essential to drug research. In particular, they believe animal experiments help humans discover drugs that slow the progress of the human immunodeficiency virus. They think it is the most effective method to confirm the safety of the drugs, to avoid losing people’s lives, and to save the research funding. In their opinion, human lives would be jeopardized without animal experimentation. However, in fact, animal testing is not an exactly correct method to solve the medical problem, not only because it is ineffective and unnecessary but also because it is immoral and ignores animals’ rights. For these reasons, animals should not be used in medical experiments.
The first reason why animals should not be used in medical experiments is that it is ineffective and can be substituted by many other alternatives in the …show more content…
modern scientific community. For people who believe that using animals as experimental subjects is essential to drug research, the modern medical achievements can prove that they are wrong by providing large number of evidence. Some people believe that animal testing is the safe way which can protect humans from virus attacks. Conversely, some people are harmed by using the medication that is proven by animal testing. For example, experiments with different mice can fail to turn up any connections between cancer and smoking. During 1976 to 1985, due to the dangerous side effects that were discovered had not been found in animal experiments, and 102 medications were either withdrawn or relabelled secondary to severe side effects. Many medication users get lethal dysrhythmias, heart attacks, kidney failure, seizures, respiratory arrest, liver failure etc. (Simith, 2010)What is more, animal experiments mislead scientists about how rapidly HIV replicates, and many people lost their lives in mistreatment. Animal testing was not only ineffective previously, but also in modern research.
There is a new era of animal testing today. A medical report says that current medications used to treat AIDS were discovered in a test tube and bypassed animal testing altogether. AIDS research with primates has also shown a high level of failure and is another example that shows animal testing is not the most effective method (Greek, 1998). Therefore, animal testing obviously is not a good protector as once thought. To some extent, instead of relying on animal experiments for their research findings, people should use the alternative methods that can directly relate to human beings which are so necessary and important. Therefore, using animals as the experimental subjects is absolutely not the right or effective choice.
Due to this fact, there are many organizations that have tried to regulate animal rights for medical research. The U.S. Department of Agriculture claims that there is 70% public approval for use of animal in medical research. Studies show that if the 3 R’s of animal research – refinement, reduction and replacement are adhered to people will forgive the inhumane treatment. (Corey, 2000) These regulations don’t reflect the suffering of the animals. Refine methods is to minimize animal stress, Reduce means the number of animals used should be at a minimum, and Replace means to use an alternative whenever possible. (Council, 2000).
Life in any form is a “thinking” man’s responsibility. People can only know that animals suffer when used in a laboratory. How can human not know that! Human cringes hyphen they see a dead squirrel on the road, or a dead cat, or see a horse suffering from injury. When human deliberately torture animals in the name of medical research, they lower their mentality to the lowest denomination. George Orwell says, “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull a plough, and he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is the lord of all animals.” (Orwell, 1984) Human are fortunate to be living in time when they have alternatives to continue medical research.
Additionally, more than one alternative to animal testing is available to researchers. Cell cultures, computer simulations, human-based testing, and scanning techniques have all proven effective. Cell culture is the complex process by which cells are grown in the laboratory under controlled conditions. Culture can be used to test for chemical absorption through skin, for phytotoxicity, and for corrosion of the skin, as well as other processes (Nakate, 2010). By using this alternative, scientists can find a solution faster and more accurately than animal testing. Vaccines for polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox are currently made in cell cultures. Due to the recent H5N1 pandemic threat, research into using cell culture for influenza vaccines is being funded by the United States government. (Williams, 2004). Meanwhile, the use of cell and tissue cultures to replace experimentation on animals has been approved by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Another alternative is to use computers to builds a model as the experimental objective, which is called computer simulation. Not only to study plaque build-up and cardiovascular risk, but also to evaluate toxicity of drugs, tasks for which animals are also used, computer models have been constructed to model human metabolism (Duncan, 2008) By using the model in a crash test, people can get more accurate data, thus reducing the negative influence for animals and humans. Additionally, human scanning techniques like Magnetic Resonance Imaging which is used in radiology to visualize detailed internal structures, is also becoming one of the alternatives to animal testing (Greek, 1998). This technique helps in carrying out biomedical research. Once the scanning application is built, researcher can complete experiments easier and faster. Human-based testing is also an effective alternative. In this kind of test, human donated cells instead of using animals. In Canada, human-based alternative is more and more popular in medical researches. People volunteering to participate in the skin patch test, which is used in finding medicines for skin irritation. It is definitely a directly method to find out the medication by getting the references instead of using animals in the skin irritation test (European Communities, 2007). It is necessary for people to choose a better approach to achieve their research goal when there are many alternatives available. Another reason why animals should not be used in medical experiments is because of it goes against the human conscience which claims it is not acceptable. Animal testing is not only ineffective but also immoral. Numerous examples indicate that these experiments are wasteful, cruel, and unnecessary. In one study, pregnant rabbits were given cocaine and their offspring received shocks in order to study maternal drug use. In another study, cats were shot in the head to show that this type of wound impairs breathing. These cruel and unusual experiments happened at Louisiana State University. Hundreds of cats were shot in the brain to show that such wounds “impair breathing”. Furthermore, a wildlife service spending $600,000 after the Exxon Valdez oil spill to capture birds, shoot them, outfit them with radio tracers, douse their corpses with oil, and throw them into the sea to “prove” that birds were killed by the spill (Balcombe, 2000). In order to see if cows can survive on a diet of 40 percent newsprint, some of university students who call themselves “researchers” cut open cows’ stomachs, inserted bags of newspapers into them. It’s so hard for most of people to comprehend that these torturous facts are actually happening every minute in this world.
In fact, some universities teach their student knowledge, but at the same time they also teach students how to destroy an animal’s life which is ironic and sad. Millions of animals have to face pain and even death each year, more than 117,000 experiments were carried out on animals at the Cambridge University labs in one year (Pemberton, 2010), and approximately 100,000 animals are subjected to research and experiments at University of British Columbia(Pemberton, 2010). There are millions of labs in this world, which means countless animals are suffering from the experiments. In modern day society, people should highlight humane and moral behaviour. It’s time for people stop treating animals with such outrageous cruelty.
Finally, animals should not be used in medical experiments is that it acts counter to the harmonious coexistence which is the essence of nature by ignoring animals’ right. Some people think that animal testing is a good way to confirm that a medication is harmless to people. They think sacrificing animal lives in order to save people’s lives is worth it. However, the opinion that animal exploitation can be justified for the benefit of humans is illogical. Humans can’t understand animals’ language, and humans are not the dictator of this world and should have no right to control lives of animals. Maybe it is fairly easy and cheap for scientists to get homeless dogs by spending less money. However, dogs are cheap but that doesn’t mean people should be allowed to take their lives away from them. As the naturalist, Charles Darwin believed, there is no fundamental difference between humans and the higher mammals in their mental faculties. Therefore, humans have the responsibility to share nature with animals as animals do with us and human should stop playing God with nature. Animals have the right to live, and also should have the right to choose what they want to do instead of being forced by humans to sacrifice them to save humans’ lives.
Justice is the highest principle of ethics (Booth, 1995). To be unprejudiced, people not accept racists or sexists because of they realize that nobody can judge a person by his or her priori condition. Therefore, no matter what weakness animal have, animals still have the right to live. It’s a fair and unselfish principle to animals. As Abraham Lincoln’s saying goes that it was a human being for people to accept animal rights as they accepting human rights (Booth, 1995). When researchers put mice or any other animals in their labs, they should ask themselves where their human conscience is.
It is time for people to reconsider the correctness of using animals as experimental subjects.
Some people think animal testing is essential to human’s lives because it is effective, it can save people life and save search finding. Nevertheless, animal testing is not as effective as people think, many people are harmed by the side effects of the medication that were discovered had not been found in animal experiments animal testing is ineffective. When there is more than one alternative to animal testing available for researcher, animal testing should not have any justification to appear in factories. Furthermore, ignoring animal’s right to life and forcing animal to sacrifice themselves is an immoral behaviour which cannot be accepted by human conscience. Therefore, people should not use animal as the experimental subject. No one has the right to benefit as a result of violating animals’
rights.
References
Balcombe J. (2000). the Use of Animals in Higher Education: Problems. Vancouver.
Booth, M. J. (1995). Save Animals. Nature , (pp.23-24).
CoreyL. (2000). Animals and Research, Part 3: Alternatives in Medical Breakthroughs. Seattle: Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Council Research Medical. (2000). Mice and Medicine. London: Medical Research Council.
Duncan E. D. (2008). Game of Hearts. Charlotte: Edmonton Lake.
Fifth Report on the Statistics on the Number of Animals used for Experimental and other Scientific Purposes in the Member States of the European Union Commission of the European Communities, published November 2007 9 ( pp. 9) Greek C. R. and Greek J. S. “Research on Animals Does Little Good.” Rocky Mountain News 12 Oct. 1998: 4A
Greek C. R. and Greek J. S. Specious Science: How Genetics and Evolution Reveal Why Medical Research on Animals Harms Humans. Vancouver: Continuum Publishing Group, 2002
John Whitman, “The Tom Regan Animal Rights” NCSU Libraries. . (24 Nov. 2010)
Kim Pemberton, “Group demands lift veil secrecy around animal testing” Vancouver Sun 12 Oct. 2010.
Nakate, Shashank. “Alternative to Animal Testing.” Buzzle.com 20 Sept. 2010. . (24 Nov. 2010)
OrwellGeorge. (1984). Animal Farm . England: Plume. (pp. 23)
SimithAnna. 2010,2,18. Animal Rights. 2010,12,4 Animal Liberation Front:
Williams, P. (2004). National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Bethesda: NIAID Taps Chiron to Develop Vaccine Against H9N2 Avian Influenza.
Today, a much debated topic is whether animals should be used in medical experiments or not. Supporters, including professors, and research scientists in laboratory medicine, believe that using animals as experimental subjects is essential to drug research. In particular, they believe animal experiments help humans discover drugs that slow the progress of the human immunodeficiency virus. They think it is the most effective method to confirm the safety of the drugs, to avoid losing people’s lives, and to save the research funding. In their opinion, human lives would be jeopardized without animal experimentation. However, in fact, animal testing is not an exactly correct method to solve the medical problem, not only because it is ineffective and unnecessary but also because it is immoral and ignores animals’ rights. For these reasons, animals should not be used in medical experiments.
The first reason why animals should not be used in medical experiments is that it is ineffective and can be substituted by many other alternatives in the …show more content…
modern scientific community. For people who believe that using animals as experimental subjects is essential to drug research, the modern medical achievements can prove that they are wrong by providing large number of evidence. Some people believe that animal testing is the safe way which can protect humans from virus attacks. Conversely, some people are harmed by using the medication that is proven by animal testing. For example, experiments with different mice can fail to turn up any connections between cancer and smoking. During 1976 to 1985, due to the dangerous side effects that were discovered had not been found in animal experiments, and 102 medications were either withdrawn or relabelled secondary to severe side effects. Many medication users get lethal dysrhythmias, heart attacks, kidney failure, seizures, respiratory arrest, liver failure etc. (Simith, 2010)What is more, animal experiments mislead scientists about how rapidly HIV replicates, and many people lost their lives in mistreatment. Animal testing was not only ineffective previously, but also in modern research.
There is a new era of animal testing today. A medical report says that current medications used to treat AIDS were discovered in a test tube and bypassed animal testing altogether. AIDS research with primates has also shown a high level of failure and is another example that shows animal testing is not the most effective method (Greek, 1998). Therefore, animal testing obviously is not a good protector as once thought. To some extent, instead of relying on animal experiments for their research findings, people should use the alternative methods that can directly relate to human beings which are so necessary and important. Therefore, using animals as the experimental subjects is absolutely not the right or effective choice.
Due to this fact, there are many organizations that have tried to regulate animal rights for medical research. The U.S. Department of Agriculture claims that there is 70% public approval for use of animal in medical research. Studies show that if the 3 R’s of animal research – refinement, reduction and replacement are adhered to people will forgive the inhumane treatment. (Corey, 2000) These regulations don’t reflect the suffering of the animals. Refine methods is to minimize animal stress, Reduce means the number of animals used should be at a minimum, and Replace means to use an alternative whenever possible. (Council, 2000).
Life in any form is a “thinking” man’s responsibility. People can only know that animals suffer when used in a laboratory. How can human not know that! Human cringes hyphen they see a dead squirrel on the road, or a dead cat, or see a horse suffering from injury. When human deliberately torture animals in the name of medical research, they lower their mentality to the lowest denomination. George Orwell says, “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull a plough, and he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is the lord of all animals.” (Orwell, 1984) Human are fortunate to be living in time when they have alternatives to continue medical research.
Additionally, more than one alternative to animal testing is available to researchers. Cell cultures, computer simulations, human-based testing, and scanning techniques have all proven effective. Cell culture is the complex process by which cells are grown in the laboratory under controlled conditions. Culture can be used to test for chemical absorption through skin, for phytotoxicity, and for corrosion of the skin, as well as other processes (Nakate, 2010). By using this alternative, scientists can find a solution faster and more accurately than animal testing. Vaccines for polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox are currently made in cell cultures. Due to the recent H5N1 pandemic threat, research into using cell culture for influenza vaccines is being funded by the United States government. (Williams, 2004). Meanwhile, the use of cell and tissue cultures to replace experimentation on animals has been approved by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Another alternative is to use computers to builds a model as the experimental objective, which is called computer simulation. Not only to study plaque build-up and cardiovascular risk, but also to evaluate toxicity of drugs, tasks for which animals are also used, computer models have been constructed to model human metabolism (Duncan, 2008) By using the model in a crash test, people can get more accurate data, thus reducing the negative influence for animals and humans. Additionally, human scanning techniques like Magnetic Resonance Imaging which is used in radiology to visualize detailed internal structures, is also becoming one of the alternatives to animal testing (Greek, 1998). This technique helps in carrying out biomedical research. Once the scanning application is built, researcher can complete experiments easier and faster. Human-based testing is also an effective alternative. In this kind of test, human donated cells instead of using animals. In Canada, human-based alternative is more and more popular in medical researches. People volunteering to participate in the skin patch test, which is used in finding medicines for skin irritation. It is definitely a directly method to find out the medication by getting the references instead of using animals in the skin irritation test (European Communities, 2007). It is necessary for people to choose a better approach to achieve their research goal when there are many alternatives available. Another reason why animals should not be used in medical experiments is because of it goes against the human conscience which claims it is not acceptable. Animal testing is not only ineffective but also immoral. Numerous examples indicate that these experiments are wasteful, cruel, and unnecessary. In one study, pregnant rabbits were given cocaine and their offspring received shocks in order to study maternal drug use. In another study, cats were shot in the head to show that this type of wound impairs breathing. These cruel and unusual experiments happened at Louisiana State University. Hundreds of cats were shot in the brain to show that such wounds “impair breathing”. Furthermore, a wildlife service spending $600,000 after the Exxon Valdez oil spill to capture birds, shoot them, outfit them with radio tracers, douse their corpses with oil, and throw them into the sea to “prove” that birds were killed by the spill (Balcombe, 2000). In order to see if cows can survive on a diet of 40 percent newsprint, some of university students who call themselves “researchers” cut open cows’ stomachs, inserted bags of newspapers into them. It’s so hard for most of people to comprehend that these torturous facts are actually happening every minute in this world.
In fact, some universities teach their student knowledge, but at the same time they also teach students how to destroy an animal’s life which is ironic and sad. Millions of animals have to face pain and even death each year, more than 117,000 experiments were carried out on animals at the Cambridge University labs in one year (Pemberton, 2010), and approximately 100,000 animals are subjected to research and experiments at University of British Columbia(Pemberton, 2010). There are millions of labs in this world, which means countless animals are suffering from the experiments. In modern day society, people should highlight humane and moral behaviour. It’s time for people stop treating animals with such outrageous cruelty.
Finally, animals should not be used in medical experiments is that it acts counter to the harmonious coexistence which is the essence of nature by ignoring animals’ right. Some people think that animal testing is a good way to confirm that a medication is harmless to people. They think sacrificing animal lives in order to save people’s lives is worth it. However, the opinion that animal exploitation can be justified for the benefit of humans is illogical. Humans can’t understand animals’ language, and humans are not the dictator of this world and should have no right to control lives of animals. Maybe it is fairly easy and cheap for scientists to get homeless dogs by spending less money. However, dogs are cheap but that doesn’t mean people should be allowed to take their lives away from them. As the naturalist, Charles Darwin believed, there is no fundamental difference between humans and the higher mammals in their mental faculties. Therefore, humans have the responsibility to share nature with animals as animals do with us and human should stop playing God with nature. Animals have the right to live, and also should have the right to choose what they want to do instead of being forced by humans to sacrifice them to save humans’ lives.
Justice is the highest principle of ethics (Booth, 1995). To be unprejudiced, people not accept racists or sexists because of they realize that nobody can judge a person by his or her priori condition. Therefore, no matter what weakness animal have, animals still have the right to live. It’s a fair and unselfish principle to animals. As Abraham Lincoln’s saying goes that it was a human being for people to accept animal rights as they accepting human rights (Booth, 1995). When researchers put mice or any other animals in their labs, they should ask themselves where their human conscience is.
It is time for people to reconsider the correctness of using animals as experimental subjects.
Some people think animal testing is essential to human’s lives because it is effective, it can save people life and save search finding. Nevertheless, animal testing is not as effective as people think, many people are harmed by the side effects of the medication that were discovered had not been found in animal experiments animal testing is ineffective. When there is more than one alternative to animal testing available for researcher, animal testing should not have any justification to appear in factories. Furthermore, ignoring animal’s right to life and forcing animal to sacrifice themselves is an immoral behaviour which cannot be accepted by human conscience. Therefore, people should not use animal as the experimental subject. No one has the right to benefit as a result of violating animals’
rights.
References
Balcombe J. (2000). the Use of Animals in Higher Education: Problems. Vancouver.
Booth, M. J. (1995). Save Animals. Nature , (pp.23-24).
CoreyL. (2000). Animals and Research, Part 3: Alternatives in Medical Breakthroughs. Seattle: Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Council Research Medical. (2000). Mice and Medicine. London: Medical Research Council.
Duncan E. D. (2008). Game of Hearts. Charlotte: Edmonton Lake.
Fifth Report on the Statistics on the Number of Animals used for Experimental and other Scientific Purposes in the Member States of the European Union Commission of the European Communities, published November 2007 9 ( pp. 9) Greek C. R. and Greek J. S. “Research on Animals Does Little Good.” Rocky Mountain News 12 Oct. 1998: 4A
Greek C. R. and Greek J. S. Specious Science: How Genetics and Evolution Reveal Why Medical Research on Animals Harms Humans. Vancouver: Continuum Publishing Group, 2002
John Whitman, “The Tom Regan Animal Rights” NCSU Libraries. . (24 Nov. 2010)
Kim Pemberton, “Group demands lift veil secrecy around animal testing” Vancouver Sun 12 Oct. 2010.
Nakate, Shashank. “Alternative to Animal Testing.” Buzzle.com 20 Sept. 2010. . (24 Nov. 2010)
OrwellGeorge. (1984). Animal Farm . England: Plume. (pp. 23)
SimithAnna. 2010,2,18. Animal Rights. 2010,12,4 Animal Liberation Front:
Williams, P. (2004). National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Bethesda: NIAID Taps Chiron to Develop Vaccine Against H9N2 Avian Influenza.