Is Animal Experimentation Ethical?

It is a topic that has been debated for a very long time. Is animal experimentation ethical? Without animal experiments, diseases like diabetes, tuberculosis, malaria, and vaccines for polio would not have been developed. Using animals as experiments helps develop many different treatments and also helps find safer ways for treatments. Animal testing is the only accurate way of learning the human body without harming the person. Although many might argue that scientists are putting the lives of animals at risk by testing on them, but is animal life valued more than a human life? Thinking emotionally, there might be some guilt for harming the lives of animals, but thought about how many human lives have been saved from animal testing makes all animal testing worth it.

To begin with, animals may not have the exact same psychology as humans, but animal testing is accurate enough to test whether a substance is safe enough for human trials (Gerty). Looking upon the fact that animal testing has developed treatments for bacterial infections, which are a major cause of death, has saved millions of lives. A treatment for bacterial infections is penicillin, which was used on mice to check if it would harm the human body. The mice were first injected with the deadly doses of bacteria and then some were injected with penicillin, and some were not. The result stated that penicillin could be used as a treatment for penicillin when the mice dosed with penicillin survived. Without this experiment, the treatment for bacteria would have never been developed further. This experiment has saved millions of lives of not only humans but also animals.

Furthermore, people might believe animal testing not only help saves human lives, but what many ...

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...century animals are kept like family and to save one family member is it okay to kill the other one?

To conclude, if animal testing did not exist much of the work developed today by scientists would not be here. Dr. Michael E. Debakey said, “Not only one advancement in the care of patients, but advancements you use every day are developed by animal testing” (Debakey). Developments like antibiotics and blood pressure play a critical role in animal testing. By testing animals; scientist and doctors can understand the growth of species and figure out possible effects that can arise in the near future. The U.S. Foundation of Biomedical Research says, "animal research has played a vital role in virtually every major medical advance of the last century for both animals and humans". Animal testing has developed treatments like cancer, polio, and organ transplant” (Trull).