Samantha McVee
Psychology 100
Prof. Gina Bell
February 25th, 2015

Exam 1 Essay: How do you feel about experiments on animals for research & why?

I have never really given much thought to how animals are treated when they are used for research, nor have I ever truly given much thought as to what types of animals are used and/or what type of research is done with there animals. When considering my view on this topic I began looking at the benefits verses the negatives and I believe that the benefits far outweigh the sum of the negatives. The article we were required to read stated a few of them, however, they didn’t mention any of the negatives. I believe they left this out because they backed up their reasoning with information on the guidelines they must follow and how many people are involved in protecting the animals.
I think animals must be used for psychological research because it would inhuman and unethical to use human beings and as the article stated it is not practical to use humans when our life spans are much longer. Not to mention, it would be much hard to collect a specific population fitting into their specific criteria, as well as controlling all the variables that a human has control over that could interfere with the researchers data.
The amount of federal regulations and guidelines really helped seal the deal for me. I didn’t know how animal research was regulated before reading the article and now that I know more information, I certainly agree with the use of the animals. I was impressed to read how many different organizations are involved to make sure these regulations are met.
The fact that typically only rats, mice and birds are used for research, it does bother me to know monkeys and other primates are used. I suppose if they were bread and raised for their specific purpose it wouldn’t bother me and I would have to assume research aren’t allow to go out into the rainforest to capture these animals just the same way they wouldn’t use rats and mice found in the wild. This again brings up how inhumane it would be to breed and raise humans for any type of research.
Researchers have been using animals for far longer than most people know and the animals are always used in conjunction with other types of testing such as, computer