AO3- Animal Testing

Animal testing

Arguments for and against animal testing

Drugs

For

“British law says that any new drug used for medicine must be tested on at least two different types of live mammal. One of these must be a large non-rodent type animal”.

In the UK, laws protect all lab animals from cruelty during testing and all labs are inspected regularly to make sure that the tests are being carried out properly.

Animal testing has helped to develop vaccines against diseases like measles, rabies and mumps it has also helped to develop drugs to fight the effects of HIV and cancer rely on animal tests to find new treatments. Operations on animals have helped to develop organ transplant and open-heart surgery techniques.

Against

An animal's response to a drug can be different to a human's and the stress the animals experience in the lab such as staying in a cage, can affect the test results.  Therefore the tests can seem pointless as the drugs/ products could have different effects to a human than an animal.

Also testing drugs on animals can affect the animal’s health on a long term effect.

It presents a bad role model as if people see animals being tested for experiments; it might promote other people using animals for dangerous test of their own.  

There are many other ways to test product without the use of animals, for example:

• Taking human tissue samples and testing the drugs on them in a test tube.
• Carrying out experiments using computer models and programmes.
• Looking at large numbers of statistics.

Animal researchers say that it will be impossible to stop all animal tests, however most scientists accept that it is extremely important to minimise the suffering of laboratory animals, and to use as few animals as possible. This could result in the same animals being used over and over again, leading to a poor quality of life for these test animals.

Other Products

For

Other products are tested on Animal to ensure that they are safe to be used on for humans or to be used by them.  These products are: 

• Household products
• Agricultural chemicals
• Industrial chemicals
• Pesticides
• Paint
• Food additives

Using these product on animals will be an advantage as we will be able to see what reaction the chemicals make on the animal to see if they are safe for humans to use such as perfume, house products etc.

Against

Using other products such as paint, perfume is wrong to use on animals as because they are new product, the results are unknown and therefore could harm the animals. It’s not fair that animals have to be used as pawns because the scientists are not brave enough to test the products themselves.

There is no purpose for using paint on animals as animal react differently to chemicals as we do, therefore using paint on animal will have no benefit on the human race.