Against Animal Testing

Humans guarantee each other many rights including happiness, dignity, health care, employment, voting, and free speech. These rights come in to question when taking away non-basic interests, such as comfort or quality of life, or losing interests that lower a quality of life. We then create a system in which we must choose which beings deserve and do not deserve certain treatments to meet our own desires. This is why some companies and organizations have begun to create new alternatives to testing on animals. People argue against or for animal testing on a basis of morality, validity and necessity which can all come from very different perspectives. However, animals are living organisms too, that feels pain and should have rights protecting them from such inhumane testing of products. Animal testing has been used since the 1800’s. Louis Pasteur used chickens to develop his small pox vaccine which saved countless lives, but with the times changing and technology ever advancing there is little need to continue to test on animals. (Murnaghan) Product testing accounts for ten percent of all animal use for scientific purposes, which may seem like a small percentage, but actually translates to millions of animals being killed every year in order to produce a new type of mascara or moisturizer. Animal testing like this is unnecessary because of, as many scientists have said; there are too few replacement techniques to use in place of animal tests. However this is false, there are many alternative ways to test, like one replacement alternative that is testing on a synthetic skin called Corrositex. It can be used to see if a chemical substance will burn or corrode skin. Another form is, Computer modeling, specifically for educational purposes such as dissecting a frog in a biology laboratory. Computers also help scientists to gather more information from one test subject than before, therefore needing to harm fewer animals. There are many refinement techniques currently being used to try and use fewer animals in research, or be less invasive or harmful to animals that are tested on. Some refinement techniques include voluntary human testing, high-quality MRI’s, and testing on manufactured human cells. Studies in well known publications such as the Journal of the American Medical Association and the British Medical Journal have repeatedly concluded that because of the fundamental biological differences among species, animal tests do not reliably predict outcomes in humans. These same studies have also concluded that the overwhelming majority of animal experiments fail to lead to medical advances that improve the health of humans and, in fact, are often dangerously misleading. (Blue) You can conclude that the best way to get proper results for human products is to test on humans themselves or another alternative that closely relates to the human anatomy. Animal testing for human products is an obsolete method that can often skew results for human use and can negatively affect the human body. Many scientists have accepted this conclusion and have moved on to develop, validate, and implement methods for studying diseases and testing products that save animals' lives and are actually relevant to human health. One biotechnology corporation has developed a 3-D in vitro (test tube) human "liver" that scientists can use to study the breakdown of chemicals in the human body. This technology effectively simulates human organs and can be used to test cosmetics, drugs, and chemicals. Another method of research that’s better for humans is antibody research, which can now be produced using DNA that's made in a laboratory or taken from human cells. These are just a couple of new age methods of research that is better suited for products used by humans, because of their human organism