Advantages Of Animal Research

Animal Research is the use of non-human animals’ model in research and development projects. It could also be called as animal testing or animal experimentation. Globally, millions of animals such as mice, rats, rabbits, cats, dogs and monkeys are use annually to facilitate advances in research and development projects.

Animal researches or testing are mostly done by the industry group such as pharmaceutical, cosmetic and food companies. Animal researches are also conducted by academic groups or researchers in universities or research institutes.

These two groups use the animal to test the effectiveness and safety of their products such as cosmetic, drug, food supplement and chemical before they conduct the clinical trial on human. They

During the experimental process, the animals are force to go through procedures like injection, surgery, induced tumour growth, induced disease etc. These procedures cause them pain, side effect or major discomfort. Some experiments may require the sacrifice of animal to get their tissue or tumour for histopathology studies. Many animals will be sacrifice just to get enough statistical data for publications or submission of application for drug to be approved. Other than going through procedure, the animal also suffer from their housing facilities. They may be confine to small cages or put under unhygienic condition. The scientific community actually acknowledge that animal does suffer throughout the experiment process. It is compulsory by some European countries national law that researcher must grade the level of discomfort of the animals during experiments. The level of discomfort in experiments is minor, moderate or severe. Averagely, 50% of the animals face minor discomfort during experiment (example: single blood sampling), 30% experience moderate discomfort (example: recovery from anaesthesia) and 20% went through severe discomfort (example: toxicity tests). (Bauman V., 2004). Since animal suffers, we shall not put them through experiment just as we will not make another human being suffers going through the same

There are many other different ways to understand diseases pathway, to test drug efficiency etc., Neal D. Barnard and Stephen R. Kaufman, 1997 written on Scientific American that researchers have other methods that they can use in their experiment. These techniques could be in vitro testing utilising cell or tissue. These cell based assays and tissue models can be used to test the efficiency and safety of drug, chemical etc. Researchers can also use the molecular biology technique that includes genetic, metabolic and biochemical factors on disease incidence, which helps in identifying the causes of human diseases. Bioinformatics can also help in their research. Researchers can study diseases pathway or development using human body stimulation model generated by computer. Basically, we can substitute living animal by in vitro techniques, computer modelling and even human