Ethical Issues in Animal Experimentation

There is of course the huge ethical consequence that comes from testing on animals. It is also super expensive to actually test on animals and some of the information from the tests don’t give accurate results for us. Animals are different from humans everyone knows that. That’s money, manpower and time going to waste. It’s also very expensive compared to other options that are out or already developed. The cost of animal testing is enormous and doesn’t always yield results.

One big example is the millions spent on a vaccine for aids/hiv which is needed but not even the testing on chimps has brought us the cure. There’s also the gruesome side of some of these facilities such as the Silver Spring monkeys. These monkeys lived and terrible life in small cages full of feces. The living conditions although terrible were not as bad as the actual tests conducted. They would cut certain nerves and then shock the monkey after being paralyzed from the nerve cutting to see how the muscle would react. These poor monkey suffered from the tests and due to the nerve cutting and them not understanding why they couldn’t feel their limbs some would bite and maul their own limbs. Fortunately another scientist gathered evidence against the facility and got them arrested. There are some very inhuman factors to using animals in our labs. The grotesque abuse of some is enough to get people arrested what does that say about it as a whole.

Alternatives to animal testing

Since there are lots of people that are against animal testing there are active scientists trying to find alternatives such as a artificial skin that reacts like our skin to products. This is both safer, more accurate, and less expensive than animal testing. There also some human trials with willing test subjects that only get very small amounts injected into them. Since all of the human test subjects are willing it’s more ethical and since there is nothing more similar to human than another human it is way more accurate. Some companies test on animals deem the product safe then test it on humans and get a whole other answer and the product is not safe. Another major part of animals testing is transplants, now surgeons have practiced on animals and fine tuned the methods the use on humans with animals. Now the bad part is the developed an artificial heart valve as opposed to using a pig’s heart valve. The scientists then tested the valve on dogs and deemed it unsafe and not fully functional. The thing was that dogs react differently to it than humans so now an artificial heart valve is the best replacement, even better than the pig valve. The sad part is no one can say that animals use can be completely abolished because a live organism is the best test subject. But there are promising options being developed.

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