Animal Cruelty In Biomedical Research

Animal Cruelty comes in several forms, many of which are often overlooked by people on an everyday basis. Animal cruelty is defined as someone hurting or not properly caring for an animal responsibly. A big contributor to this is animal testing, which is the use of animals in research and developmental experiments. In order to fully understand animal testing, a brief history of when and why it was started in the first place. Biomedical research is the most basic form of animal testing. This research is used in experiments that have the goal of learning more about the function of living organisms. While this type of research is intended to further understand human disease, that is often times not the case. “Although most basic scientific

Approximately 46% of the experiments tested on animals fall into this category. The use of fundamental testing is to answer scientific questions that researchers think may be pertinent to the future of human medicine. A study of the statistics gathered shows that out of 101 experiments done, only 5% of them were actually approved. Meaning these tests seldomly lead to medical discoveries. With all of this information, one can come to the conclusion that these tests, due to their lack of positive result, are not at all necessary (“Types of Animal Testing”).

Regulatory testing is standardized testing designed to see if medicines, chemicals, cosmetics, and other products are safe for human use. In these experiments, animals are held captive and forced to either eat and inhale substances, have them rubbed into their skins or injected into their bodies. The animals are then monitored around the clock to see how the chemicals effect their tissues and organs (“Types of Animal

Mice, among other animals, are being bred with specific genes placed into their bodies. As a result of these implanted genes, a good chunk of the animals dies while still babies. These statistics are based on the small amount of GM animals that are actually recorded (“Types of Animal Testing”). Genetic engineering is a very similar type of testing. Scientist can now modify or delete specific genes. When this is done to an animal, it is known as a “transgenic” animal, which means that the genomes can now be modified to express human genes. The controversy over this method is that the results cannot be 100% accurate and able to provide useful information due to the fact that the gene is being used in an animal. This is where even more controversy comes in; “The human genome has now been cloned, which means that researchers can work with human proteins expressed in immortal cell lines, which can be grown in large quantities in the laboratory. This means that researchers no longer have the excuse that animal experiments are the only available option to research human disease and cellular function.” So if testing animals in this way is no longer necessary, then why is it still being allowed to happen? Although the article later did state that with the increasing knowledge of human genes, proteins, and cells animal research on human diseases may later become a thing of