Over decades, the debate of animals being used for testing and experimentation to determine the safety of products has become heated. Society has drastically opposing sensitivity, opinion, and perception toward animals. On one side, many recognize and know animals to be companions. Some religions, such as Hinduism, even go as far as hosting festivals to honor and worship animals. However, many people view these creatures no more than aiding medical practice or contributing to experimental research. There is no denying that recent breakthroughs within medicine are extraordinary, there is not a need to use animals for laboratory experiments because of the mere fact that this is the method that has been used for decades. Technology is a beautiful thing, and with the constant advances, there is no excuse as to why these helpless creatures are still being abused for medicinal purposes. Although, even labeled as “mild”, there are procedures conducted that will can cause pain, suffering, and even death. Aside from the extreme ethical and moral issues, there are complications of how correctly these substances or drugs will react in real human situations. AWA
According to Human Society International, animal testing is defined as procedures performed on livings animals for purposes of research into basic biology and diseases, assessing the effectiveness of new medicinal products, and testing the human health and/or environmental safety of consumer products such as cosmetics, household cleaners, food additives, and pharmaceuticals (Humane Society International). The USDA published the 2017 Annual Report Animal Usage by Fiscal Year for research statistics. In both private and public institutions, 792,168 animals, covered by the Animal Welfare Act, were used in research. This excludes animals not covered by the Animal Welfare Act such as mice, rats, and fish and around 140,000 animals kept in research facilities that have yet to be used in any studies. The animal Welfare Act (AWA) is a federal law established in 1966 when the prevalent concern for the dogs and cats being utilized in research at the time, especially the considerable amount of reported thefts of dogs and cats for practice in research facilities (NAVS The Animal Welfare Act). The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) uses two primary tools to aid the AWA compliance: inspections which are managed by an animal care inspector or veterinary medical inspector, and the next being investigations that are handled with or by the APHIS Investigative and Enforcement Services (Florida bar journal).
Thesis Finding Alternatives for animal testing does not mean putting risk on humans, rather how replacing cruel animal testing will enhance the accuracy of our sciences.
Animals are sentient beings. There is no question to whether animal experiments will cause an immense amount of suffering. While researchers attempt to decrease stress and agony to the animals being worked on, suffering for these creatures is inevitably imminent. Simply, there is no way to ease the mental and psychological pain when there is someone inflicting disease or injury while being held in a sterile cage. While researchers have the good intention of finding a cure or averting illness and disease, some medicinal researchers fail to acknowledge that the animals they are conducting experiments on are not just an unconscious being without pain receptors. Certainly, laboratory animals are evaluated as an object they can manipulate in any sense for the sake of a clinical trial. Most spend the majority of their lives in an artificial environment with no windows and artificial lighting.
Scientifically, failure in animal-based toxicology trials has been repeatedly documented to inaccurately anticipate the way humans will react to chemicals. While trials may present great improvement for the animals with the same disease or disorder humans may have, this outcome often does not pertain to trials on human subjects. For instance, acetaminophen, an active ingredient in Tylenol, is extremely lethal to cats and morphine, a common pain reliever, causes them to be hyper-active. Human anatomy, metabolism, and physiology differ drastically from animals, causing data from animal experimentation to transfer or apply inaccurately to human condition.
According to the US National Library of Medicine Nation Institutes of Health, there are three major conditions that explain why any animal-based medical experimentation fails to reliably inform human health: the effects of the laboratory environment and other variables on study outcomes, the difference between animal models of disease and human disease, and species differences and physiology and genetics (NCBI). Laboratory environment can be a major influence on an animals behavior. Surroundings such as noises being made or even the room they are in can alter what was their once normal behavior to complete anxiety. For example, if a researcher is trying to catch and remove a frightened animal from it’s cage it can drastically increase and/or prolong elevations in their stress markers. An escalation in stress influenced by a laboratory environment or experiments could ultimately affect the outcome of test results. When stressed, rats will experience intestinal damage and could also develop chronic inflammatory conditions, which would add to the inaccuracy of the data being collected (NCBI). While stress can manipulate important test results, there is a multitude of different environmental scenarios that can prove how they can physically and psychologically affect animals. For instance, even the type of flooring on which an animal is tested in a spinal cord injury experiment can affect whether a drug shows benefit or causes more complications (NCBI).