Animal Experimentation Is Unnecessary and Cruel
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Every year, millions of animals suffer through painful and unnecessary tests. Animals in laboratories all over the world live lives of deprivation, pain, isolation, and torture. Even though vast studies show that animal experimentation often lacks validity, leading to harmful human reactions, we still continue to use this method of experimentation, while many other less-expensive and more beneficial alternatives exist. Going beyond the issue of animal experimentation being morally wrong, this form of research is also hindering medical progress. Although the use of animals in laboratories is said to be necessary for the welfare and health of humans, people mistakenly believe that this immoral and unscientific method of experimentation is essential in curing human illnesses.
First of all, animal experimentation is wrongly based on the idea that animals can be used as smaller models of humans to find cures for human illnesses. One problem with using animals for experiments is that the results frequently don’t apply to human. What people fail to realize is that animals are not simply smaller models of humans and have significant biological differences from humans, leading to incorrect test results. Furthermore, animals respond differently to drugs and surgeries than humans do. One specific example of this is the rat, an animal commonly used as a test subject for drugs and medications. Unlike humans, rats have no gall bladder, which means they excrete
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bile very effectively. Since many drugs are excreted through the bile, this affects the half-life of the drug, and therefore, the outcomes of test results (Greek). In addition, it is also unreliable to use animals for human experiments because animals do not have the capability to express how they are feeling, as humans do. For this reason, observations made in laboratories are all guesswork because the true “well-being” of an animal being tested on is unknown. Consequently, “The only universal model for a human-that is, one which would best predict what would happen at a given endpoint across the full range of chemical structures, concentrations, ect.-is other humans” (Greek). Because of differences in animal and human anatomies, they respond to drugs in different ways, proving test results done on animals to be inaccurate when applied to humans. For this reason, animal experimentation has done little to produce any definitive advances in medical research and has actually hindered medical progress.
In addition to the fact that animal experimentation is ineffective, unreliable, and costly, testing on animals also violates animal rights. Do we think that just because we are superior to animals that we have the right to subject these innocent creatures to cruel and painful experiments? The superiority humans feel over animals may be the reason why humans feel less troubled by inflicting pain on animals. Or perhaps humans justify this cruel act by saying that animals would not be used in experiments if their use was not absolutely necessary. The pain and misery these animals are put through is absolutely unjustified, especially since the experiments they are subject to are proven to be unnecessary and even pointless. As Ingrid Newkirk states, animals in the laboratories are “under constant stress from fear, the loss of control over their lives, and the denial of all
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that is natural and meaningful to them, such as enjoying the company of others of their own kind”(Newkirk 2). Thousands of animals are put through