Animal Testing should be banned!
Most of you probably might not realise, but each year more than 100 million animals are dying in US laboratories for biology lessons, medication testing and cosmetics testing. Today I will be discussing about why animal testing must be banned worldwide. I will explain to you how animals are different to humans, which makes them poor test subjects as well, as how animals can suffer as humans do and it is classified as speciesism. I will also mention that animal testing is wasting the lives of the animal subjects. How would you feel if the cosmetics you wear on a day-to-day basis caused the death of innocent little rabbits? Alternatively, the very cleaning supplies you use in the house were force-fed in large portions to a dog as a favoured species in toxicology studies slowly poisoning them.
Your siblings, your parents and all your loved ones who may be suffering from an illness are not rats, dogs or monkeys. So why do animal experimenters keep treating them as though they are? Although we share most of our genes with other animals, there are critical differences in how our genes actually function. Scientists, circumvent these differences by altering animals’ genes in attempt to make them more “human-like”. Suppose you are an experimenter and are determining if a steroid, will help humans with spinal cord injuries. After altering animals’ genes and crushing the spinal cord of many different animals, then you test the drug on them. Once you have the results, how can you determine if this steroid will help humans with spinal cord injuries? Animals are not humans, so testing is not accurate. According to the FDA, only 5-25% of animal tests and human tests agree, there is little relevance to humans. Furthermore, only 9% of products tested on animals make it to stores.
Another harsh thing experimenters do is that they take out a dog’s vocal chords so they do not disturb the lab workers. As for death to animals, the experimenters will euthanize the animal after being tested on or will use the animal again for further testing until they are either dead or useless. Animals are not just objects. They have feelings and can think just like us humans do. Rene Descartes, a French philosopher and scientist, said that people have the right to use animals just as if they were machines. The more similar the animal is to a human means the more intelligent and sentient the animal is. Descartes also believed that only humans have feelings and could think. If this were true, anim...
