Animal Testing Ethics

Animal Testing Ethics

Is animal testing right or wrong? No one has really answered that so

far. Everyone has their own opinion about it. I personally think that

if we are not abusing the testing it should be allowed. I don't think

it is necessary to test animals for every little thing that goes on

the market but sure why not when it relates to a life or death thing

like cancer. How else would we make sure the medications wouldn’t kill

us?

Safety tests are conducted on a wide range of chemicals and products,

including drugs, vaccines, cosmetics, household cleaners, pesticides,

foodstuffs, and packing materials. The safety testing of chemicals and

consumer products probably accounts for only about 10% to 20% of the

use of animals in laboratories, or approximately two to four million

animals in the United States. Yet the use of animals in safety testing

figures prominently in the animal research controversy. It raises

issues such as the ethics and humaneness of deliberately poisoning

animals, the propriety of harming animals for the sake of marketing a

new cosmetic or household product, the applicability of animal data to

humans, and the possibility of sparing millions of animals by

developing alternatives to a handful of widely used procedures.

The Animals in Research section is committed to promoting alternatives

to the use of animals in product testing as well as in biomedical

research and education. Alternatives are scientific methods that

accomplish one or more of the "Three Rs": They replace the use of

animals in a scientific procedure, they reduce the number of animals

used in a procedure, and/or they refine a procedure so...

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...rmissible to kill and

to inflict pain in order to prevent a (quantitatively or

qualitatively) greater evil, to protect life, and when no reasonable

and feasible alternative is available. The attempt to claim that moral

responsibility is reserved to the human species is self defeating. If

it is so, then we definitely have a moral obligation towards the

weaker and meeker. If it isn't, what right do we have to decide who

shall live and who shall die (in pain)?

The increasingly shaky "fact" that species do not interbreed "proves"

that species are distinct, say some. But who can deny that we share

most of our genetic material with the fly and the mouse? We are not as

dissimilar as we wish we were. And ever-escalating cruelty towards

other species will not establish our genetic supremacy - merely our

moral inferiority.