Animal Testing Essay

Animal Testing: Helps or Hurts?
Did you know that more than 100 million animals are poisoned, burned, crippled, and abused in other ways in U.S. labs each year? ("Eleven Facts About Animal Testing.") Animal testing is a controversial issue that has been happening for years. Animals undergo many types of scientific investigations without the certainty that their suffering and probable death is going to benefit humans at all. Clearly, it is not the same as taking one's pet to the vet, animals that are used for scientific purposes are intentionally harmed and generally killed at the end of the investigation. Therefore, a lot of people claim that there are alternative methods that can replace the need for animals, that animals are different from

This activity started in 500 BC and has been increasing since then because of the technological developments. Some of the first people to ever practice animal testing were Aristotle and Galen, Greek scientists and physicians. They both conducted experiments on live animals in order to improve the field of medicine; enhancing the understanding of aspects such as anatomy and pharmacology. Another great example of animal testing are the surgical procedures from Ibn Zuhr, an Arab physician, who started to perform these procedures in animals before applying them to humans. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3123518/) Animal testing has been accompanied by objections throughout its history. Nevertheless, as it became more popular in the 19th century, the opposition group started to increase. Animals’ abuses were published in many newspapers during that time in order to create a public anger towards animal testing. Because of all of the attention that animal testing received, some regulations have been established all around the world; for example, in 1998 Great Britain

The first argument that they use to disagree with the thesis of this essay is that there are no alternative methods for this kind of procedures. The living system is way too complex to explore it in a petri dish and predict reactions to certain substances without testing the living system as a whole, with a living animal. For example, “ blindness cannot be studied in bacteria and it is not possible to study the effects of high blood pressure in tissue cultures.” ("CBRA Fact Sheet: Why are animals necessary in the Biomedical Research?") Anyways, in order to use computers to study this kind of situations, scientists first need to experiment with animals so they can come up with trends that then can be interpreted by a computer. But not even the best computer is going to be able to react like a living thing is going to do, the brain works in a completely different way than a computer