Conducting Medical Research on Animals

“The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval”, this was written by Peter Singer in his book Animal Liberation. Animals are all over, whether it is at home as companions, at the circus as entertainment, or in our closets as clothing. Citizens of the United States are aware that the medicines we are to take have to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but many of us have been ignorant to how exactly the majority of these medicines are approved and who are the testing dummies that are used to come up with these medication. Conducting medical research with animals has caused break out of legal, scientific, and ethical dilemmas concerning that topic. In this paper I will try to give an unbiased understanding of the research experiments animals have to undergo and the ethical issue that arise supported by Peter Singer.
It has been recorded that physician-scientist such as Aristotle and Erasistratus has performed experiments on living animals. In 1937, a pharmaceutical company here in the United States, came up with a drug called Elixir Sulfanilamide. This drug consisted of a solvent that was highly poisonous which lead to the death of hundreds of people. It wasn’t until then that the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act required testing of drugs on animals before they could be marketed to humans. In 1959, W.M.S. Russell and R.L. Burch introduced the three R’s for the use of humane treatment of animals. The first R is for the replacement of animals with non-living models, the second R is for the reduction in the use of animals, and the third R is for the refinement of animal use practices.
The Animal Welfare Act signed in 1966, is the only federal law that regulates the treatment of a...

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...ood stream. Still the question on pain comes up, do animals really feel pain or is it just an assumption. Pain is known to be as a “mental event” that only we feel and the only way people know that we are feeling pain is because we tell them. Animals on the other hand have their own way of communicating that they would like to be helped; behavior signs of pain include writhing, facial frowns, moaning, appearance of fear, and yelping. Lord Brain, the neurologist, once said “I at least cannot doubt that the interests and activities of animals are correlated with awareness and feeling in the same way as my own, and which may be just as vivid.” This explains that animals and humans do have a correlation among each other when it comes to their surroundings and activities. Therefore animals would be aware when they are in a tense environment and nonetheless feel pain.