What Are The Ethics Of Animal Testing

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A highly controversial argument of utilizing animals in the testing and development of medical research has left scientists at an impasse on the ethics behind the operations. Approximately 115 animals are used each year in the United States for both scientific and commercial testing. Every 1.7 seconds one animal is killed, which adds up to 28,000 a day. These animals become experimental subjects to be used for dangerous procedures, so humans don’t have to do it. Animals are used to test the safety of human consumption, determining the toxicity of medication, and developing stable medical treatments. In the United States, 94% of animal testing is used for cosmetic research, which leaves only 6% for medical research. Using animals as test subjects …show more content…
Scientists begin by rubbing chemicals on the skin or in the eyes to test how irritating the product will be, without any pain relief if it begins to abuse their bodies. They also force-feed animals the bacteria that goes into cosmetic products to test for signs that can cause illnesses. Not only are they forced to eat this bacteria, they are also at times given a lethal dose of the bacteria to allow scientists to learn how much of the bacteria it takes to actually kill a person. Once these tests are completed, laboratories will then kill the animals by using asphyxiation, neck breaking or decapitation to put them out of the misery that they have caused them. Approximately, 100,000 to 200,000 animals die a year just from cosmetic testing. That’s a giant portion of animals being thrown into experiments and killed just to make cosmetic products for the public. These animals are dying to help people out with products that they so desperately want. No one puts into aspect how all the animals feel during the testing, and how much pain they really go through at times. It’s an unneeded practice when a human’s reaction to the cosmetics may be completely different that it was for the …show more content…
This leaves only a small fraction of cosmetics that actually get approved, but the ones than do get approved usually end up getting withdrawn or relabeled due to the adverse affect that wasn’t detected during animal trials. This causes a reliability issue with consumers that are interested in the product, because there is no guarantee that there will be a different effect. No person will want to buy products that may hurt them, or be dangerous by being in their household if kids are present. Why put the animals through the process if the cosmetics don’t even work most of the time, and end up failing. According to the 2013 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, they found that 150 million clinical trials that are trying to reduce inflammation in critically ill patients has failed even though it had succeeded in animal testing. The experiments that are done on animals have different effects on people because our bodies respond differently to the chemicals and drugs being using on animals. Animal testing should be put to a stop because with the tests failing, taxpayers are wasting money on tests that aren’t producing a result that is wanted. Instead of wasting money on failed tests, there are other alternatives to cosmetic animal

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