Casie Machado
Goswami
English 1 CP Period 2
11 May, 2014
Animals: Human Substitutes

First of all, I should explain what animal testing is. Animal testing or animal experimentation as the name would imply is the experimentation that is carried out on animals. The animals are tested on the see how safe or effective a medicine or make makeup would be on a human, they’re also used to help understand how the human body works. Many people are against using animals as test subjects because it’s cruel and inhumane. Others however are vey pro animal testing, they claim that using live animals give better results than any computer simulation ever could and using animals is better than knowingly putting a human’s health in danger. I believe that animal testing should be put to an end. It’s really unnecessary torturing and killing an innocent animal when there are other alternatives.

Animal testing is being banned all over the world, but surprisingly it still continues in the United States. There are dozens of other methods that don’t require animals as test subjects that are more accurate, cheaper, and get faster results. PeTA, which is an American animal rights organization, says, “Instead of measuring how long it takes a chemical to burn away the cornea of a rabbit’s eye, manufacturers can now drop that chemical onto donated human corneas. Human skin cultures can be grown and ordered for irritancy testing.”(PeTA). There are methods like In vitro testing can produce more accurate results because human cells can be used and computer models that can make virtual reconstructions of the human molecular structures can predict the toxicity of substances without the use of animals. Why test on animals when there are so many other methods that can be used?

If you were to look at the anatomy of a rabbit and the anatomy of human, you would see some similarities, but ultimately you’d be able to realize that they’re both very different, which is why animals don’t really make very reliable test subjects. While scientist may need to test on a living subject, they would need a human subject if the product was meant for humans otherwise their results won’t be completely accurate. Helen Marston, who heads Human Research Australia, says, “Even the US Federal Drug Administration confirms that nine out of ten drugs ‘proven’ successful in animal tests fail in human trials. This not only questions the efficacy and the fundamental argument for using animals, but critically raises the question about all the drugs that failed in animals which might have worked in humans.”(Marston). Just because a medicine works on an animal doesn’t necessarily mean that it will work on a human. Wasting the lives