Should Animals Be Used In Scientific Research?

Should Animals be used in Scientific Research? Animal testing is a method of testing drugs and cosmetics on animals to predict the possible reactions on humans and to evaluate the products if they are safe for human use or not. While animal testing seems a beneficial practice, there is a hidden side that some people might not take in to consideration. Bentham “The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but rather, "Can they suffer?"” (, year). If animals can speak, only then people will stop using them in researches. However, that is not the problem, as the quote implies that the core issue is that many animals are suffering until death in laboratories and still people are continuing this practice. Therefore, people should
It is morally wrong to do harmful things to innocent creatures, which we would not do to our pets. While some people might think that rats are the only animals used for testing and they are being killed anyways, many other animals such as, cats, dogs, hamsters and rabbits, which are considered as pets, are used for testing too. Although, no one will ever allow researches to test chemicals on their pets, some people might think it is a must to keep the humankind. Moreover, the word “human” is often used in animal testing. Some researchers claim that they treat animals like humans and no harm is done to them. Also, researchers identify the purpose of animal testing by saying that this is all done to understand human’s body to cure human diseases and eventually, increase humans’ life expectancy. These reasoning phrases are often used to persuade the public that animal testing is purely humane and acceptable practice. However, it is totally the opposite, according to Marinescu’s article (2010) that discussed the ethics of animals testing, there are many cruel practices held in laboratories such as burning animals, cutting their ears and tails off, injecting chemicals in their bodies, poisoning them, torturing and driving them mad until death. After all of these practices, researchers still call their work to be humane. These examples conclude that many cruel practices happen in the labs and this tragedy should
Despite the fact, that animals and humans have many things in common, according to Burnett (2009), in “the cellular and molecular level” where most diseases take place, animals are different than humans. As a result, humans react differently than animals to drugs and products. To elaborate, in some cases, drugs that are amazingly affective on humans might be deadly for animals such as, Penicillin kills guinea pigs and Aspirin kills cats. On the other hand, there are many medicines that worked on animals positively but they had negative effect on humans. For example, after millions of people had been recommended a medicine and thousands had suffered from side effects, Vioxx, which is an anti-inflammatory medicine, was removed from pharmacies because it increased the risk of stroke or heart attack. (Burnett, 2009). Moreover, the factor of the results not being as accurate as needed is another reason that shows that animals are poor testing subjects. In the article “The ethics of animals testing” (Marinescu, 2010) that searches for the reasons that might affect the animal testing results discusses that “the pain, stress and discomfort” that animals experience in labs increases the chances of getting different results within the animal group that is being tested on. These physiological changes lead to reducing the results’ validity. As a result,