Animal Testing Debate

Animals are often described as loyal companions that provide unconditional love and that bring joy into our lives, but yet we allow them to be subjected to harm for research. I ask, how is this any different from animal cruelty? The government allows animals to be burned, shocked, poisoned, isolated and starved. Each year, millions of innocent animals are killed during these painful tests. For many centuries, scientists have used animals of all kinds, such as rats, rabbits, primates, cats and dogs as a way to test the safety and effectiveness of a product before human exposure. Although animal testing brings more medical advancement and less human-based experiments, it is an (time)expensive way of researching imprecise outputs and a practice

During the early 20th century, polio was one of the most feared diseases in industrialized countries, leaving hundreds of thousands of children disabled, paralyzed or dead. But, Doctor Jonas Salk set out to create a vaccination and came out successful through his biggest asset, the monkey. Monkeys were injected with extracts of the spinal cord from a patient with polio and given different treatments to see what effect it would have on the virus. This testing alone saved countless human lives, although it was an experiment that involved over 100,000 monkeys being killed in the process, it prevented bad vaccines from having bad side effects on the already suffering children (Medical Veritas: The Journal of Medical Truth). This successful experiment led many to question if an effective test on a monkey was really worse than the extreme physical and emotional pain that these children had to face. Animal testing is seen as a way to save lives and has led to the cure of many diseases, of not just polio but smallpox, tetanus and many

But animals do not suffer from the diseases that humans do due to their unhealthy life style, consequently each tested animal must be made sick. In humans, stroke is usually caused by the narrowing of a blood vessel in the brain by atherosclerosis or by a blood clot that developed in the body. Animals in labs don't naturally get strokes so experimenters “clamp their blood vessels or artificially insert blood clots” (Akhtar, Aysha). However, an imitation of symptoms has nothing to do with human diseases and their causes. The treatments found have often came out unsuccessful according to FDA, “92 percent of drugs that pass animal tests, fail to proceed to the market.” This shows how the suffering animals are put through in order to help improve the lives of humans isn’t all that productive.

Animal testing is an invasive way to look for diseases, it puts animals in misery and in an unnatural environment. They spend their lives in a cage locked up in the laboratory room, unable to experience fresh air or sunshine. Society acknowledges that animal experiments are bad, but the value of these experiments conflict with animal testing. We have laws set up to protect these animals from cruel and harmful (treatment), but completely ignore the fact of what is really happening in these laboratory test. Suffering from horrible diseases merely so that the government can