Should animals be used for scientific or commercial testing?
An estimated 26 million animals are used every year in the United States for scientific and commercial testing. There are many people say that it is cruel and inhumane to experiment on animals.
The most serious problem is that animal testing is inhumane and merciless. According to the US department of Agricultures’ report in 2020 there were more than 300,000 animals in cruel pain in just one year using by research facilities. Based on Humane Society International, the animal used in experiment usually be force feeding, burning their skin and eyes by using chemicals to research the healing process or inflicting pain to study its effects and remedies. Even if there is a law in place to protect animals from mistreatment, but only 5% of animals are protected by the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) in fact. For example, birds, rats, mice, and cold-blooded animals, all of them aren’t under protection.
Furthermore, animals are very different from human beings and cause make poor test subjects. The structure, cell and metabolism differences between animals and people let the research are not necessarily correct. So, the medicine that make out by animal tests might not be effective on human. For instance, the 1950s sleeping pill thalidomide which did not result in birth defects on animals but caused 10,000 babies to be burn with severe deformities. It is a serious case that told us animal testing is not a completely safe ways to invent a medicine. Besides in 2004 the FDA estimated that 92% of drugs that pass preclinical tests, including animal tests, fail to proceed to the market. Although experimenter try to improve the accuracy of animal tests, the failure rate still increased and is now closer to 96%. The main causes of failure are the unpredictable effectiveness and safety problems in animal tests.
Nowadays devoting enough money and resources to non-animal alternatives might have the same medical advances as animal tests. Like chemical test, in vitro tests on cells or tissues, computer simulation, and so on. Some of alternative methods have already been accepted by some national government agencies and promoted to related manufacturing and companies. So, animal testing isn’t the only way to do medicine or cosmetics research.
In conclusion it is not humane and efficient to use animal experimentation. Therefore, it would be more useful to direct resources away from animal testing and try to invent more precise technologies.
Resources:
