The Cruelty of Animal Testing: Why It Needs to End

In this scientific era animal testing doesn't sound strange. From different types of drugs to a wide range of vaccines majority are first tested on animals regardless of their toxicity and adverse effects just to verify safety levels. Keeping an animal away from nature in isolation on an artificial media for the sake of experimentation and testing is just cruel and inhumane. Imagine yourself in the place of an animal; it would sound like a deadly nightmare. Although humans are superior but being superior doesn't mean being God.

Each year more than 110 million animals including rabbits, monkeys, fishes, and birds are being killed in laboratories. Whenever a drug is made which is believed by scientists to be 90-95% effective, most of the time fails animal testing, causing animals to bite the dust. 79% of the countries don't even have any laws related to animal testing, giving free hand to scientists to perform any type of experiment regardless of its cruelty. Animal testing is just unnecessary, unethical, wasteful, and too costly as well. Some animal tests take months or even years to conduct and analyze and can cost from thousands to even millions of dollars. In an experiment of rodent, cancer studies a time of 4-5 years is consumed and it costs up to 2-4 million dollars and even the results are not too accurate.

Animals are neither human nor near human, although both share some diseases but the majority are entirely different. Animal testing is not worth at all as in 92-95% of cases certain drugs that pass animal testing fail during human trials. The drug Vioxx was found to be effective against heart diseases in mice and caused heart attacks in humans. In 2006, in London, a drug TGN1412 was tested on monkeys; it passed, but when tested on humans, resulted in organ failure and brain swelling however it passed animal testing.

Animal testing is absolutely unethical, keeping an animal away from its natural habitat for testing and experiments, is not justified at all. In laboratories, animals are made subject to electric shocks, exposed to poisonous gases, and deprived of food, what sort of experimentation is this, aren't these things painful? Different painful surgeries and operations are performed on animals in laboratories including the most painful skull surgery without administering painkillers. A large number of animals are being killed just to save a few lives; this is just cruelty and nothing else.

There are many alternatives to animal testing which include cell and tissue culture, computer models or 3d models, etc. Volunteer studies should be promoted as advances in technology have allowed the development of sophisticated scanning machines and recording techniques that can be used to study human volunteers safely without any safety risk. Actually, non-animal methods are far more accurate, time-saving, and cheap as well.

'Being superior doesn't mean to be God', although humans are much more advanced and superior but they are not free to do whatever they want, just for their benefit. They isolate animals, perform cruel experiments on them and kill them when they are done with experimentation, this is extremely intolerable. Hundreds of animals are killed to save one life, how are these deaths justified. Painful and dangerous experiments are performed on animals as if they are devoid of emotions and pain. Isn't this cruel and inhumane, where humanity is? Imagine yourself in the place of animals for a while.