Medical research on animals is a highly regulated practice. The Animal Welfare Act not only sets guidelines on how animals can be procured, but also their housing conditions, and stipulates regular veterinary examinations for all test subjects (USDA). Additionally, a scale of pain/distress categories must be assigned to each animal undergoing medical research; the highest category of pain, that being high pain/distress with no administration of anesthetics, is reserved for only those procedures in which it is deemed medically necessary to do so (USDA). Consequently, this category based assignment lowers the amount of pain and distress animals in medical research are subject to. Moreover, medical professionals want to treat animals humanely, …show more content…
However, when it comes to the decision between using humans and animals, morality should dictate that we test on animals first. Ethically we already value human lives over the lives of animals; animals do not have human rights, and if we were to assign human rights to animals we would have to stop eating meat, and we would not be able to keep animals as pets. We have a responsibility to protect animals as much as possible, but they are not …show more content…
However, the FDA requires animal testing to be conducted on a drug or treatment before the drug is approved for clinical trials, because the results obtained from alternative testing methods are most often inferior to results obtained from animal testing (U.S. FDA). One alternative method is in vitro, which is the process of testing samples, usually swabs of cells, in a test tube or culture dish. And while in vitro testing can produce very telling results about a medical procedure, this claim disregards that living organisms are more than just cells in a dish, they are complex systems, each system working in congruence. It is necessary to study the effect of a medical procedure on the system as a whole, which can produce results that in vitro testing could not (The Hastings Center). Furthermore, in vitro testing would not yield any relevant results when testing drugs that are intended to treat something such as high blood pressure, which affects several systems in the human body. Another alternative method would be computer models and simulations, which can produce virtual human body structures. However, the results from these models must be tested on animals in order to verify their validity, as the models can only simulate based on information already known about the human body, so it does not apply to research on new