Have you ever wondered how medicine is tested? It’s tested with death - animal death. These animals are deprived of their resources and locked up against their will. However, according to the California Biomedical Research Association, nearly every medical breakthrough in the last 100 years has resulted directly from research using animals. But the goods don’t outweigh the bad - sometimes drugs tested on animals might not even be safe! Some animals have different cell structures so they make bad test subjects, but scientists still test on them! This is why animal testing must be banned.

The first reason animal testing should be banned is because the animals used in tests are treated horribly. According to Humane Society International (HSI), animals used in experiments are locked up in cages, force fed and have very little food and water. Some people also purposely hurt them, to study the healing process. In 1981, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) observed that some monkeys in a laboratory in Maryland were being kept in awful conditions. The animals were so scared that they were hurting themselves! If we ban animal testing, such animals will not be kept under these conditions, and will be safe. They won’t be born there and also die there. However, animals live shorter than humans and that allows us to test on an organism’s whole life span. But that’s no excuse to let us kill millions of poor animals every year!

The second reason animal testing should be banned is because drugs that pass tests on animals are not necessarily even safe! Of all the drugs shown to be safe on animals, 92% fail in human tests because they are dangerous. For example, when the drug Vioxx was tested on animals, it had shown a protective effect on mice’s hearts. However, the medication managed to cause more than 27,000 heart attacks and unexpected cardiac deaths before being taken off the market. If we ban animal testing, this kind of situation will never happen as we will know the effects on a human being, not the effects on an animal. However, the California Biomedical Research Association states that nearly every medical breakthrough in the last 100 years has resulted directly from research using animals. But even if there is good medicine, what about the bad ones? We could use alternatives to animal testing, to prevent something like what happened to Vioxx. We can also use Cruelty-Free Products to stop killing animals!

The third reason animal testing should be banned is because animal testing cost a lot of money. According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), more than 12 Billion US Dollars are spent annually on animal testing in the US. That means that a lot of your tax money is going to killing animals! Instead of spending huge amounts of money on animal testing, that money could go to good causes and help people in need. For example, in America, 12 Billion dollars can be used to provide 4.8 million elderly people with food. It could hire 332,000 more teachers to help educate the children. 12 Billion dollars can provide $715 a month to 1.4 million people who are homeless or have the risk of losing their home - almost enough to pay rent and keep their homes. Why would we put billions of dollars into killing animals when we could do so much more with it? Even if 8% of the tests work, that’s really just using 8% of 12 Billion, which is only 960 Million Dollars. We’re wasting so much that it’s really pointless to support animal testing with so much money. It can go to a better cause, saving lives instead of taking them.

In conclusion, animal testing should be banned. The technology wastes so much money and barely works, it is almost pointless to go on with it. What works, might not even be safe! We shouldn’t kill animals and spend billions of dollars doing that for something that doesn’t even work. If we go on with this, species might go extinct. We could use alternatives to animal testing such as vitro methods. Yet we still kill animals by the thousands. If we continue this, we will be remembered for killing animals on a large scale. You don’t want to be remembered by that, do you?