Should Animals Be Used for Testing? | Teen Ink

Should Animals Be Used for Testing?

June 2, 2014
By MARKM BRONZE, Bronx, New York
MARKM BRONZE, Bronx, New York
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

Scientist use animals to test certain products before they release it to humans. I disagree with this because this could be very harmful and can potentially be fatal to animals. This is why animals should not be tested on, and even if they are tested on, the results can be completely unexpected when tried on humans, and could possibly kill someone. Besides testing on animals is more expensive than alternative methods and are a waste of government research money. Testing on animals is cruel and inhumane. This is why animals should not be tested on. The results are unreliable and it is cruel and unfair towards the animals.

Drugs that pass animal tests are not necessarily safe. There is an exceptionally large amount of evidence to back this up. For example in the 1950’s a sleeping pill called Thalidomide was released and it caused 100,000 babies to be born with deformities, and this drug was tested on animals before release and it produced safe results. Furthermore an Arthritis drug named Vioxx showed it had a protective effect on the hearts of mice, later it caused more than 27,000 heart attacks, according to the Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine. This demonstrates that animals should not be tested on. The outcome can be entirely different from what scientist expect.

Animal testing is more expensive than alternative methods and it waste government research dollars. There’s more than enough proof to prove this point. Humane Society International (HSI) compared animal testing costs to their in vitro counterparts. An unscheduled DNA synthesis animal test cost $32,000, while the in vitro alternative cost $11,000. Moreover, a rat uterotrophic assay costs $29,600, and the in vitro substitute costs $7,200. Also the U.S National Institutes of Health (NIH) wastes $14 billion of its annual $31 billion on animal testing, reported by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. This why scientists should use alternative methods instead of animal testing. This is why animals be tested on, it is a waste of money and time.

It is inhumane and cruel to test on animals. There is an unheard amount of evidence to support this statement. According to HSI, animals used in experiments are usually subjected to force feeding, forced inhalation, food and water deprivation, extended periods of physical restraint, the infliction of burns and other wounds to study the healing process, the infliction of pain to study its effects and remedies, and much, much more from what HSI tells us. Additionally in 2010 the HSI used 92,123 animals, and each of them suffered through many experiments while given no anesthesia for pain relief, according to the USDA. This is why animals shouldn’t be tested on. They’re already being used so much, they’ll eventually go extinct.

Some people argue that animals can be useful when tested on. They claim that animal testing has contributed to many life-saving cures and treatments. For example, California Biomedical Research Association states that nearly every medical breakthrough from the last 100 years came from animal testing. Proponents of animal testing cite the polio vaccine as a reason for why animal testing should be allowed. The vaccine was tested on animals and has reduced the global occurrence from 350,000 to 233 cases. Unfortunately, this argument fails to consider that Salk tested his cure on animals first, which he infected with the virus, and quite a few died in the progress.

Animal testing can be useful from time to time, but animal testing should still be banned. There are more cons than pros in animal testing. This is why animal testing should be prevented.

The results aren’t always true when tested on humans. It is cheaper and better to do substitute experiments. Lastly it’s inhumane to experiment on animals because they suffer through every experiment. This is why animals should not be tested on.


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