Use Of Animal Research example essay topic

Animal Testing: Right or wrong? A topic that has always been close to many people hearts is the one of animal testing. Some believe that it is right completely, some that it is right but only under certain circumstances and others that believe that all animal testing is wrong and will go to extraordinary lengths to stop it. There are many organisations that are against animal testing and that arrange protest marches and demonstrations against it.

This is an important issue as there are so many different views and arguments for and against animal testing, and as these are animals lives at stake here. For centuries, animals have been used in medical research. Since 1875, animal experimentation has been an on going debate on whether experiments on animals are ethical. At the very start, the movement against animal testing focused mainly on the 'inhumanity of hurting and killing living beings for experimental discovery'. Animals are innocent and they are not able to fight back for any means of suffering.

Therefore, animal testing should be banned due to the fact that animal experimentation does not benefit human health and it diverts attention away from reliable research methods. The abolition of animal testing is supported not only by animal activists but also by scientists, medical doctors, psychiatrists, nurses, veterinarians, and other medical professionals, who discredit the scientific merits of animal experimentation. Every living system differs from each other. Predicting the reaction of one species by studying another species is not accurate at all.

Lafollette and Shanks depicted the truth that 'even the most common drug given to humans does not have uniform effects in non-human animals'. Although mice and rats look very similar, their reaction upon certain drugs can be totally distinctive. Roy Kupsinel, M.D. once announced that 'animal experimentation produces a lot of misleading and confusing data which poses hazards to human health. For example, 4 million patients per year are hospitalized for side effects caused by thoroughly tested' drugs, and of those 50,000 die of the cures,' not the disease'. According to Davis, 'aspirin causes birth defects in rats and mice, poisons cats, but does not affect horses'. A well-known example of the misleading animal testing which harms human health is the thalidomide disaster.

The box accompanying the thalidomide stated that after substantial animal tests, this drug was confirmed to be safe. However, birth defects were eventually caused if pregnant women had prescribed. This resulted in missing limbs in thousands of babies. In addition, there are many factors affecting the results obtained by animal experimentation, such as stress, age, diet, gender, isolation, and crowding.

Some drugs are toxic for humans but healthy for animals; some are useful for human health but not in terms of animals. As a result, animal experimentation does not totally benefit for human health. Instead, they may harm human beings. Focus on animal research eliminates choices on other reliable research methods. With the recent objection of animal testing, more scientists started to pursue other research methods.

As we expected, the non-animal researches are superior to animal research. Instead of animal experimentation, some other successful alternatives without killing animals include In-vito studies, Mathematical models which predict novel results, and Physio-chemical studies which analyse the properties of drugs. As a result, scientists should adopt other reliable research methods rather than animal experimentation. Although a number of medical doctors and scientists do not support the use of animals in laboratories, animal experimentation's are still taking place. Animal research does not benefit human health in some ways, but they contribute an important role in medical science. For example, the polio vaccine, kidney transplants, and heart surgery techniques have all been developed with the aid of animal research.

In spite of the fact that in a recent count, 60 to 75 percent of animal experimentation's are duplicating the previous studies, such as the effect of pain in combination with cocaine and other drugs, and the drug dependence and 'noxious's tumuli. In other words, animal research does not provide as much fresh information as before. In contrast, some conservative physicians advocate the use of animal research because they believe that 'accidental discoveries will lead us to the advances' and 'they are reluctant to adopt alternative methodologies, such as tissue cultures, which would require extensive re-training'. They believe that science cannot advance without animal experimentation.

Other than some 'old-fashioned' physicians, animal breeders, animal dealers, and animal food suppliers also oppose the termination of animal research because they will lose millions of dollars, which is supposed to be their profits. Animal research cannot guarantee the effects of drugs on human beings Therefore, scientists should spend more time on other research methods rather than sticking with this old method of animal testing. Day by day, animals are suffering in laboratories by electric shock and ravages of syphilis. Nevertheless, they can do nothing to escape from mistreatment in laboratories because they are not able to fight back.

Therefore, being humane, we should help them get rid of the useless suffering because the animal tests they are involved in are not beneficial to human health and are driving away attention to other research methods.