What Is Wrong With Animal Testing

Animal Testing According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), over 100 million animals are killed every year in the United States only for educational purposes and for testing potential medicines and products. Although animals have been the subject of experiments since the 300 B. C, it was in the nineteenth century that those experiments became widespread (Orlans 3). With the dissemination of this phenomenon, the popular conscience grew and became a worldwide issue (Orlans 3). Nowadays, animals are used to test medicines that can cure human diseases, but also are used to understand and prevent some of those diseases such as cancer or heart problems. Additionally, some companies use animals to test products, such as toothpaste …show more content…
It has been proven by many scientists that humans are not the only animals who can feel pain, anxiety, fear, stress or any other emotion because those perceptions have allowed spices to survive by making dangerous experiences unpleasant, which, usually, makes the individual avoid them in future occasions (Bekoff 67). The only difference is the quantity of those feelings that each animal notices. It is true that between each individual pain and emotions are never the same and so it is with other species such as mice or monkeys. This fact is due to the physical and psychological conditions and preparation of each subject. In her book In the Name of Science, F. Barbara Orlans, explains that the most common tests used to analyze the effectiveness or the safety of products are the Draize and the LD50. Both of them imply a large amount of pain to the animals and sometimes death. On one hand, the Draize test consists in applying possible toxic or irritant materials to rabbits that are conscious and healthy, in order to avoid those substances in future products. After the application, rabbits are examined regularly to find possible damage in their skin. On the other hand, the LD50, or median lethal dose, consist in determining the amount of substance that the subject needs to receive in order to cause death. In this second test half of the subjects die, and sometimes …show more content…
It is known that every species have its own gens and characteristics, which makes the results unreliable and different depending on the subject. Sometimes, even with human the results diverge from an individual to another, which makes the results from other spices even less reliable. Also, diseases develop in different manners between individuals, making the job of finding medicines even more difficult. Gill Langley, an experimented scientist about animal rights and testing alternatives, reported that one of the most failed experiment is the AIDS antibiotic. Scientists had been researching the AIDS cure more than twenty years, but until now it has not been found. A significant amount of vaccines had been tested on apes, such as chimpanzees or macaque monkeys, and the results were positive and the disease could have been prevented and cured; however, when those antibiotics were injected into a human subject, the effects were not similar and the patients could not restore their health (Langley 3). This example proves that even if researchers find a potential medicine that works on apes that is one of the spices more genetically related to humans, does not mean that will work on people. Also, when the vaccine is injected in a human subject, it becomes the real tester because it is the first to experiment the