Animal Testing

The United States and Gabon are the two only countries that allow animal testing on chimpanzees due to the fact that they share a 99% DNA match with human beings. This shows that foreign biomedical scientists are skeptical about the testing on such a close relative of the human, as the things they do to the animals are inhumane. This was recorded by the US Department of Agriculture which reported that 97,123 animals suffered pain during the experiments while being given no form of anesthesia. Animal testing is an everyday occurrence in which biomedical scientists experiment for effects on their newly developed medicinal products. Animal testing should not be legal however, because it is an inhumane experience for the animals and is not always accurate.

Although some biomedical scientists may say that animal testing is necessary to test the safety of new drugs, there are other forms of testing that can be done to test them, forms that are safer for animals such as glass testing, micro dosing, and micro fluidic chips which give more accurate results for humans, which is the reason scientists test on animals in the first place. Humans may have DNA similarities with animals but the anatomic, metabolic, and cellular differences between humans and animals plays a large role in finding treatment and cures for diseases. These differences could be the reason humans don’t cure cancer, due to the effects an animal showed but a human wouldn’t, or they may even be beneficial to animals yet harmful to humans. An incident of this occurring was with the drug thalidomide, a sleeping pill, which caused nearly 10,000 babies to be born with deformities or a drug named Vioxx that caused over 27,000 heart attacks. Even with all of the the animal testing being done, there is no accurate guarantee of benefitting humans with any of the data we collect from the effects of the drugs on animals therefore it should be stopped.

The government has attempted to create an act that will protect the animals that are being tested on, “guaranteeing” them rights during testing just like a human would have. This act is called the Animal Welfare Act, and this protection is nonexistent. Only 5% of the animals used in the experiments are being protected with the AWA. The act does not cover rats, mice, fish, or birds which are 95% of the animals they use in research. Without coverage from the AWA, around 25 million of these kinds of animals are being left vulnerable to mistreatment and abuse.

Even with the Animal Welfare Act, the protected animals are left in extreme animal abuse situations. In the New Iberia Research Center in Louisiana, 338 violations of the AWA were being broken in 2009, against supposedly protected animals. These are not just minor violations either, in fact there were horrific details shared during the investigation against NIRC. There were reports of primates with such high stress levels, that they were self mutilating by tearing gaping wounds into their own arms and legs. With primates being one of the few animals protected by the AWA, this shows that this law is practically useless in guaranteeing the rights of animals in a laboratory. It isn’t even imaginable if researchers would abuse protected animals, what they would do to the unprotected ones which we keep as domestic pets.

Each year the government wastes millions of dollars on the testing of animals. This is money that could be spent on a more reliable and humane way of testing. In 2009, a study was conducted showing that in most UK and US animal studies, there was bias with the animal selection which means the tests of these animals were no longer reliable. Unreliable animals are killed in labs when they cannot be used. Even when they can be used however, they still will eventually be killed during or after the experiment. These kinds of things are occurring to animals all over the world. Poor, defenseless, and innocent animals are being tested on and killed even if their test was successful. Putting the humane reasons aside, this is a large waste of money on the government’s part which could be saved using more reliable test methods such as glass testing, micro dosing, and micro fluidic chips and actually curing more diseases. An animal’s life, especially one so related to a human as a primate, should not be valued much less than a human’s life, and the fact that we continue to test on them, torture them, and kill them in tests is an act of specieism.

Many people think that animal testing is extremely beneficial to the development of consumer products in the world. In fact, many biologists and biomedical facilities approve of animal testing for this reason. These same science industries believe that animals don’t truly have rights that protect them therefore making it okay for them to be tested on. They also say that testing on animals is beneficial because some of them have such close DNA with humans, such as primates. In response to this, there is no direct evidence that shows that animal testing led to any major medical advances which means it could not be helping out research at all. Also, saying animals have no rights is not true because animal abuse is against the law and that is the exact same thing they are doing in those laboratories, abusing animals physically, mentally, and emotionally. When it is said that it is beneficial because they relate so closely with humans in DNA, it isn’t even like testing on an animal even, but a human. The 1% of their different DNA shouldn’t be the reason they are locked up in a cage and tested on, there should be no reason for that.

Animal testing is a horrific and disturbing occurrence that happens in biomedical labs all over the world. In these labs, animals are mistreated and abused every single day as multiple tests are performed on them. These tests are unnecessary and inaccurate as animals are very different from humans with their genetic makeup, even if the DNA is similar. Imagine looking at your dog/cat and seeing him in a cage in a room with multiple other animals that could be covered in scars and blood, and filled with emotional terror. This is truly what the inside of an animal testing lab looks like, and unless these tests are stopped, many animals will suffer and die. If animal testing is outlawed, biologists have a better and friendlier way to find accurate cures that will work with human diseases as well as save the lives of many animals.