ANIMAL TESTING IS UNETHICAL

Every year, millions of animals are subjected to painful medical experiments. These animals are forced to live in confinement and undergo experiments that can include anything from testing the toxicity of household products to injecting the animals with drugs or diseases that may end up leaving them burned, blind, brain damaged, or even dead. Many of the animals die before the studies are even over and those that don't are either killed or re-used.

On top of the atrocity of the experiments themselves, laboratories often provide dismal living conditions for the animals. The animals are frequently abused, maltreated, and neglected by workers. They are treated more like disposable lab equipment than the living, sentient creatures that they are.

ANIMAL TESTING IS UNRELIABLE

Due to the biological differences between animals and humans, animal tests often yield results that differ from the results in humans. The disparity in these results can be harmless, but it can also lead to severe outcomes. Drugs that appear to be safe in animals may actually be lethal in humans. As a result, many drugs that seem promising in animal studies often fail in human clinical trials.

ANIMAL TESTING IS UNNECESSARY

Modern methods such as tissue-engineering and microdosing are able to yield more effective results than animal testing. Tissue-engineering allows scientists to grow tissue models that replicate real human tissue. These tissue models can mimic almost anything from human skin equivalents to human internal systems. By testing on this tissue rather than animal tissue, researchers are able to see a more accurate depiction of how exactly drugs will react in the human body. Animals differ too much anatomically from humans to be completely reliable.

Additionally, microdosing is a technique that involves administering ultra-low doses of drugs to humans. Microdosing allows researchers to see how drugs are metabolized in the body while the low dosage ensures that no harm will be done to the human.

IT IS TIME FOR A CHANGE

Before the creation of modern technologies and methods, animal testing was crucial to medical research. In today's day and age however, animal testing is no longer necessary nor valuable to medical progress. New technologies render animal testing virtually useless and provide more ethical and reliable results.

Currently, the Animal Welfare Act imposes minimal standards for the treatment of animals. However, it fails to stipulate protection for many types of animals involved in animal testing such as mice or rats. Additionally, the act approves all types of medical experiments and fails to prohibit any that is excessively cruel or unnecessary. I believe the Animal Welfare Act should be amended to protect all species of animals from the jarring effects of animal testing and ban unnecessary experiments that could be replaced with non-animal tests.

As animals have no capacity for laws or moral judgements, I do not believe that they deserve equal rights to humans; but I do believe that they deserve equal treatment. As human beings, we have a general moral obligation to treat animals with the same respect and principle of nonmaleficence as we would humans. Animal testing is expensive, unreliable, and disturbingly unethical. It is time to ban animal testing and end this maltreatment once and for all.