Animal Experimentation: Are Animals Right Or Wrong?

Although there are several people who are against animal experimentation (anti-vivisection), there is still the other side of people who under look the problem at hand and are okay with it happening. In their minds, they’re thinking that animal testing has been here for many, many years, so why put an end to it now? Others think, “animals cannot have rights because animals don’t respect human rights” (Mur, 31). Although this poll was taken around eighteen years ago and things may have changed since then, it still need to be put on the table. In 1996, 72% of people said that testing on animals is only sometimes wrong. That leaves 29% of people to think that it is completely wrong. How is unethically putting animals under intense pain only sometimes …show more content…
They may think that because animal testing has been around for so many years that there is no other way that we can still continue to make products safe for humans. Yet again, they are wrong. With today’s science there are some alternatives that scientists can take to end the usage of animals for their experimentation. Most of the time the products that are harmful to animals are still put on the market for people to purchase, so there was no reasoning to test the product on the animal. Alongside from that, even if the chemical is safe by “animal standards”, there is still only an 8% chance that it is safe for humans, which is very slim (Ericson). The tests that are put on animals sometimes show no indication on how the product will affect a human. One scientific advancement that scientists have made is when they test products and chemicals on an animal’s liver. Instead of running a drug through the animal liver, they have used a chemosynthetic liver. In one case, the trial for using the chemosynthetic liver was successful and was able to save the lives of one thousand rats and one hundred dogs. Following that experiment, this method was proven to work for fifty other similar cases, and probably much more considering this was almost eleven years ago (Ericson). I think that the use of these alternatives are much more reliable than tests that are performed on animals. As well as being …show more content…
At first they thought that this method would work but they were proved wrong. After every time this method was used, every human recipient of the transplant had died because their body’s would reject the organ. Another example would be a drug that was used for arthritis killed sixty one people, but was successful for animals. Medications that are used for heart disease and high blood pressure also were marketed to consumers even though there were “misleading” results when experimented with animals (“The Use of Animals”). This just goes to show that there isn’t always a correlation between the effects on animals and the effects on humans. Scientists had performed hormone replacement on monkey’s which turned to be successful, then they had given the hormone replacement to women which was found to increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, and breast cancer. Another prime example, Isoprenaline (asthma) worked on animals but was too high for human standards. As a result thousands of humans died. Carbenoxalone, used for gastric ulcer treatment, was successful when tested on animals but yet caused people to retain water to the point of heart failure (“The Use of Animals”). If those cases right there, along with several others, were not enough to make someone see that animal testing should not be used anymore,