The Unreasonableness of Animal Testing Essay

For nearly a century, drug and chemical safety assessments have been based on laboratory testing involving rodents, rabbits, dogs, and other animals. Aside from all the issues they pose animal tests are time and resourceintensive, restrictive in the number of substances that can be tested, provide little understanding of how chemicals behave in the body, and in many cases do not correctly predict realworld human reactions. According to Doctor Aysha Akhtar, M.D., M.P.H. a neurologist, public health specialist, and author, If you were volunteering for a clinical trial, there is more than 90 percent chance that the drug that tested safe and effective in animals will be ineffective or unsafe in you.5 The result that comes from testing on an animal will not be the same as if a human would be tested on the same thing. We keep on forgetting that we are not the same species and that there will be different effects if we are tested on the same thing. Scientists are even aware of the flaws that come with using animals as models of human disease. Drugs that may be effective in animals may not be as effective in humans and vice versa. Not only does it not work on a human but it can lead to complications of the heart and other parts of your body. A good example of this would be thalidomide. Thalidomide was used in the 1950s as a sedative and prescribed to treat morning sickness in pregnant woman, thalidomide was safe when tested in animals but when used by motherstobe it led to birth defects in over 10,000 children.6 People doing these experiments on animals know that not only are they risking an animals life they could also be risking a human one too. Even primate animals which is more likely to be the same as a human body, fail to predict what happens in humans. So why do it? Why bother to hurt a living thing if the results will not be accurate. Why not stop this and look at other solutions that can help us find a closer match to a human body.

There are so many reasons why animal testing needs to be stopped because it violates animals rights. Animals are not supposed to be kept in captivity such as laboratories they should be set free or they should be with caring and loving families. Animals should be treated with respect and kindness. All these things are done in laboratories but if they were done outside these places they would be considered crimes. if someone on the outside would be torturing an animal they would be charged with crime, why not make it the same as if they were being tortured in a laboratory Humans cannot justify making life better for themselves by randomly torturing thousands of animals per year to perform laboratory experiments or to do test products. The animals suffer everyday with no protection from cruelty. So in the end is it really worth it?