The Importance Of Animal Testing

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Dear United States Government,
To obliterate the respect of an animal's life is to disregard the lives of thousands of people. Using animals for research has been a heated topic of debated for years now; and approximately 60% of tested animals are being used in product-safety tests, this includes cosmetics and medicines (New England Anti-Vivisection Society). We live in a world full of cruelty, a world full of hate, but also... a world full of love; so why do we take our hatred out on the innocent lives of billions of animals? More damage is done to the earth by a human being than by 100,000 rodents. People view animals as either a companion, or as a means of advancing our world medically; but that doesn’t change the fact that animals are …show more content…

It is known that both human and animal have what is known as sensory tissue that acts as an alarm system for your body to warn you that damage could be caused; this means that we both feel pain. The International Association for the Study of Pain describes pain in animals as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage” (The International Association for the Study of Pain). Actually, animals feel pain and react the same way as humans do when inflicted with pain, including screaming and the tightening of muscles. As stated before, when animals are subject to laboratory research or toxicity testing they face immense pain and sometimes death. One famous toxicity test is the Draize test (usually performed on rabbits) this test is infamous for the extreme pain and suffering forced upon the animals. During this test animals are restrained and the product being tested is placed in the eyes, and that animal is then monitored to see any eye damage and to ascertain the effect it would have on a human. End results usually include intense pain and blindness, this test has been chastised as a waste of time and of animal. Although the use of this test has diminished over the past few years it has not been completely eradicated. Animals are still being put through tests that apply immense pain and cause unnecessary deaths while being unable to help with human-safe products. According to Thomas Hartung, a professor of evidence-based toxicology at John Hopkins University, using rats for toxicity, for example, must not be accepted as reliable since humans are nowhere close to being 70-kilogram rats (Hartung). We may be biologically related, but size and structure and health conditions are completely different between human and animal. In fact, a recent study

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