Imagine you are six weeks old, alone, scared, and forced to be locked behind bars. During your lifetime all you've known is pain, fear, and testing. This is how many animals grow up, living in terrible conditions with a big responsibility, to sit still and accept that this new drug might be the one to finally kill you. Thousands to millions of animals die each year because mankind has accepted that we need to sacrifice animals to evolve. Why do we choose the innocent animals? The ones that have not even seen the light of day. But to us, it’s just life, inflict pain on one, to help many. All of these animals should get to live a happy and healthy life, not some cruel depressing life, behind a cage. I understand many people have their own opinions but how can we truly believe in our opinion without understanding the history behind it, why its accepted in society, why most people don’t understand animal rights, and lastly why people think animal testing is cruel?

Animal testing has always been around. The first use of animals was by early Greek physician-scientists like Aristotle, 129-199 AD, and Erasistratus, 304-258 BC. Then later on, Claudius Galenus, Galen, one of the most famous known greek physician and surgeon practiced anatomy, physiology, pathology, and pharmacology on the animals living around him. This helped the greeks evolve their practices on humans and what medications could be used to help treat illnesses. People kept testing on animals when, in the 19th and 20th century, testing became a very important thing. This was a major time in the medical field, many advancements were  made. The advancements meant more animal testing, which was pushed by the Medicines Act of 1968. This came after the Thalidomide tragedy. An article titled Thalidomide written by the UK science museum under a blog called Brought to Life, Exploring the History of Medicine says “It was one of the darkest tragedies of the pharmaceutical research history”. Thalidomide was a drug marketed as a safe sleeping pill for all, including pregnant women. When the drug was used during pregnancy it caused thousands of children, worldwide, to be born with malformed limbs. This drug was not tested, so this tragedy made animal testing seem important, necessary even. After that the animal testing rate increased rapidly, as advancements in penicillin, insulin, the polio vaccine, and elimination of smallpox became big. Many consumers then soon believed that animal testing was necessary and they needed it to trust products. Lots of big name cosmetic products are tested on companion animals such as dogs and cats. This makes people feel secure and confident when they use the product. The use of companion animals when testing is to show that if the product is save for your dogs and cats, it’s safe for you.

Many people felt the need to trust products that were animal tested. So then more and more people accepted it and said they needed it to live safely. There are some people that believe in animal testing for many valid reasons, one of them being if they suffer from the same diseases as humans then we can trust that the medication that works on them will work on humans too. So why not test on animals and help cure them and help cure humans? It sounds like a win win to me. But there are lots of scientists that have found that many animals we test react differently to the medication. The people that believe animal testing is ok are probably the ones that know without it survival rates in cancer, AIDs, and breast cancer would have never increased. They also look back at instances like the Thalidomide tragedy, where medications were not tested on animals. They think why should the whole world trust a possibly unsafe medication and have another devastation. Nine out of ten Statistics are Taken out of Context written by Speaking of Research says that, “92% of drugs that are successful in animal trials fail in human trials”. This is true but taken out of context. They don’t all fail at the same point in a clinical trial and many factors play a role into why a medication could fail. It has been narrowed down to two main reasons thought. One being the drug is simply to powerful for the individual or the drug itself is too powerful for the human body. The second being that the drug is simply ineffective for humans, or ineffective in enough humans that the drug will not be passed as “safe” by the FDA.

One big topic you can’t miss when talking about animal testing is animal rights. The definition of animal rights is the flowing: “The rights believed to belong to animals, to live free from use in medical research, hunting or other services to humans.” This definition is true, but many still argue that animals should have the same rights as humans, yet those people have two dogs and a cat at home. Isn’t that hypocritical, to say and believe animals should live free, not under the possession of humans but have companion animals at home? One thing we need to get straight as a society is that if we can break animals rights, we can break human rights. We all have the same right to be free, so why are we taking that away from animals? So many people believe that if animals can make their own decisions they have rights. But many studies show that animals are not self-aware, meaning they do not understanding the decisions they are making. On the opposite side of the opinion, people think animals don’t have rights and they are just around for people to use. Today we use animals for many things like, dogs to help lead the blind, to provide meat or milk, and many other jobs that are “necessary”. But one thing that is very unnecessary is testing, possibly unsafe, drugs on innocent animals. Many of the people that agree that animals have rights, think that animal testing is cruel. 

People that  protest and are activists look at facts and publicise them. The biggest thing that activists think about is age. The age of animals that are used in labs are anywhere from 6-20 weeks. That means as soon as they can be stripped away from their mother and siblings, they are brought to labs to begin a clinical trial. This results in a lot of the animals being depressed and unable to trust the people working in the lab. Activists also look into the things that the animals are put through. Most of the clinical trials involve the animals to be shocked, burned, poisoned, and some of these can result in death. But it’s ok, right? Because without them millions of people would be dead. But is it really worth it to hurt innocent, newborn animals? There are so many more debates that animal rights activists have to be educated about. There are a ton of studies, facts, and opinions that these activists have to be aware about. One thing that most activists against animal testing get wrong is that animals have rights and that they want all animals to live happily with families.

Animals do not deserve to be stripped from their family at the age of only 6 weeks. Its cruel and unfair to them and as a society we need to better understand why we began using animals to test. Today we use animals for testing and we think its a right to humans, but isn’t that against animal rights? Together as humans we need to treat animals better, understand animal rights, understand each opinion, and why we should support or not support animal testing. In all we should just think about the animals, and the world and where we want to be in 10 years. Because if we don’t change, we start looking like the killers, not the diseases.