The Inhumane Practice of Animal Testing: Why It Should Be Banned

In this essay, I wish to discuss the topic of whether animal experimentation should be banned. Vivisection has been around since roughly 300BC when the ancient Greeks used animals to study sensory nerves and motor nerves to understand their functions and purposes. It has been used for testing treatments for human diseases, scientific research, cosmetic research and the examination of various products which may be found in the house, such as washing-up liquids and dishwasher tablets. So the topic is whether animal testing should be banned, in this essay I state that animal testing should be banned as it brings so much unnecessary suffering to defenceless, innocent, helpless animals.

Firstly, testing on animals is an enormous expenditure. Numerous costs have to be covered including: food and water for the animals, providing a home, cleaning the lab, cages and the equipment used in the experiments and of course there is the added cost of having the lab examined due to The Animal Welfare Act inspections and the price of paying the research staff. Keep in mind that these drug trails could last for years. For instance, Cancer research on mice and rats may well take up to 4 or 5 years and cost millions of dollars per tested substance and turn out to be useless as about 90% of drugs are removed at different phases of safety inspections: 'According to an analysis of government data, the National Institutes of Health spends between $12 billion and nearly $14.5 billion on animal testing every year. According to NIH documents, about 47 percent of research grants have an animal research-based component'. Surely, sacrificing endless numbers of animals lives is not worth all the money and hassle.

Furthermore, even though there is The Animal Welfare Act, most animals are not protected by it. In 1966, The Animal Welfare Act began to make sure that animals being tested on are treated and looked after fairly well. 'The Animal Welfare Act (AWA) requires that minimum standards of care and treatment be provided for certain animals bred for commercial sale, used in research, transported commercially, or exhibited to the public'. However, you have to understand that just because the law is in place it by no means ensures that the animals are treated justly. Shockingly, only 5% of the estimated 22.2 million animals used in labs per year in the US are covered by The Animal Welfare Act. Some animals which are protected by the law are dogs, rabbits, hamsters and cats. Animals that are not protected include animals which are typically tested on the most; birds, fish, rats and mice.

Furthermore, animal testing should be banned and I will be persuasive with this as another reason why I believe that animals should not be experimented on is that it's cruel to force animals to be 'experiments'. In a year, there are over 100 million animals used in vivisection. That means 100 million animals per year are forced and then locked in cages, to then be tortured and drugged until they are put down or killed by an experiment. An example of the sort of experiment animals are made to live through is rodents are involuntarily made to inhale cigarette smoke. They are connected to pipes and tubing, forced to inhale the smoke and then slaughtered to see how the smoke affects their bodies, so scientists have a rough idea of how it affects the human body (even though our bodies are not that much alike anyway). This is what happens almost every time a new 'flavour' is released from a tobacco company.

On the other hand, some people that are pro animal testing may argue that medical research on animals can sometimes save many lives. A treatment for rabies and anthrax was discovered through a scientist who tested on animals. Rabies is a disease which is rarely seen now, but if caught could be very serious as it 'infects peripheral nerves and moves to the central nervous system'. The vaccine for this disease was found by the French biologist Louis Pasteur: 'He developed his rabies vaccine by growing the virus in rabbits, then drying the affected nerve tissue to weaken the virus'. Anthrax is a disease which is caused by bacteria called 'Bacillus anthracis'. The vaccine for this disease was also found by Louis Pasteur in May 1881. He took a group of various different animals (sheep, cows and a goat) and half of them were vaccinated and half of them were not vaccinated. Thirty days later, they were injected with Bacillus Anthracis and the group of animals without the vaccine died, and the group with the vaccine survived.

Despite this, I still feel that animal testing is wrong  as most animal's bodies (for example, rat's bodies) are very different from human bodies, so research may not be entirely accurate. Only 94% of drugs that successfully pass animal trials are deemed safe for humans. Which means tens of millions of animals die without cause and their pain and suffering is absolutely pointless. For example, Amrinone is a drug that used to treat heart failure and was tested on animals and was believed to be safe for human consumption. Even after being tested on various animals such as hamsters, mice, guinea pigs, dogs, rats and even rhesus monkeys, it eventually gave 20% of the patients treated with it 'thrombocytopenia (a lack of blood cells needed for clotting)' and some of these patients even died. Therefore, animal testing is clearly not always dependable and is inaccurate.

Most importantly, nowadays, there are better alternatives to animal testing (for example, testing in a petri dish). Today, as animal testing is so expensive and inhumane, and so many people object to it, the most intelligent scientists on earth have come up with ways to test treatments for diseases without having to torture animals. An example of some alternatives to animal testing is methods such as 'sophisticated tests using human cells and tissues (also known as in vitro methods), advanced computer-models (often referred to as in silico models), and studies with human volunteers'. In vitro testing is when tissues and blood cells are taken away from the human body to be tested on in a lab. These diagnostics can be used to reveal illnesses and help to treat and avoid diseases. I personally feel that all of this proves and demonstrates that animal testing is pointless and we should definitely ban it. Why should these animals suffer for no good reason? Is animal testing necessary at all?

To conclude, there are plenlty arguments on why we should stop animal testing. I believe that banning animal experimentation is the correct and humane thing to do. Although there are arguably some benefits which come from animal testing for example, the vaccine for diseases such as anthrax and rabies, it seems to me that there is no viable reason for animals to be tested on as all it does is cost a great deal of money and the lives of pitiable animals who don't deserve to suffer like they do, especially now that we have better alternatives to animals testing. It is easy enough for us to not think about what is going on behind the closed doors of laboratories, but try to think about it this way: how would you feel if it was your chatty bird or cute hamster that was dragged into a lab to be experimented on and forced live the rest of their short lives in excruciating pain?