Why Is Animal Testing Wrong

In today’s world, people have everything from the latest in cosmetics to cutting-edge medical treatments and drug products. A fact that people tend to ignore, however, is the dark underbelly of the product research world - animal testing. It’s on the news and in the media quite often, with organizations like PETA pleading for justice and conjuring up horror stories of animal mistreatment. While it is true that animal testing is ethically wrong, there are other issues as well. Animal experimentation should be replaced by more advanced technologies because it is inhumane, produces results that are inaccurate, and is scientifically limiting.

First of all, animal testing is harmful and cruel to animals. When they are not being injected or smeared with some substance, lab animals live in extremely stressful conditions. In fact, a 2009 study showed that lab monkeys experienced stress-induced psychosis - basically, they were being driven insane (neavs.org). Though the Animal Welfare Act requires a committee of scientists to
Animal testing has produced more failures than successes and significantly impedes scientific discovery. One example of such failure is Lipitor, a drug used for lowering cholesterol. It looked unpromising in initial animal experiments, but was only shown to be highly effective in people after being tested on a few human volunteers ("Results from Research on Animals Are Not Valid When Applied to Humans."). The most commonly used lab animals (rats, mice, and birds) are too biologically and physiologically different from humans to properly simulate human reactions to a substance. Many of the diseases and health conditions that humans suffer from are nonexistent in the animal world, meaning that testing medicines to treat these conditions on animals is rather pointless ("Results from Research on Animals Are Not Valid When Applied to