Animal Welfare Act Of 1966

Animal testing is the experimentation used on animals for research to ensure the safety of everything ranging from medication to make up products (Murnaghan). An average of 26 million animals are victims of animal testing each year (Bardroff). This is a huge issue that needs to be addressed by everyone. Why should 26 million animals die each year from animal testing be ethical while testing on a single human being is seen as unethical? The Animal Welfare Act of 1966 was supposed to have eliminated the mistreatment of animals in testing. Everyone became reassured that the animals were not being harmed or mistreated and that it was for a good cause. However, the law doesn’t protect the most commonly used animals in testing. The Animal

90% of the animals used for testing are unprotected by this law. The law was originally established in 1966 due to concerns about stolen pets (“Explanation of the Animal Welfare Act”). It was made to regulate how the animals were taken care of in the lab as well as how the labs got the animals to test on (“Explanation of the Animal Welfare Act”). In 1970 some amendments were made to the act concerning warm blooded animals (“Explanation of the Animal Welfare Act”). The amendments to the act were made in order to expand the protection to include farm animals and pets (“Explanation of the Animal Welfare Act”). They also required that the animal received enough pain medication for the experiments unless, it would cause an interference with the test results (“Explanation of the Animal Welfare Act”). This proved to be unsuccessful due to thousands of animals going through pain in experiments each year. In 1976, an amendment was made to the act again in order to make laws on how the animals were transferred to and from each location (“Explanation of the Animal Welfare Act”). Finally in 1985, it became required to have oversight for experiments and to be able to justify the tests being done on the animals (“Explanation of the Animal Welfare Act”). This had not been a requirement before 1985 (“Explanation of the Animal Welfare Act”). In 2002, an amendment was made that enforced the exclusion of mice, rats and birds from the AWA of 1966 (“Explanation of the Animal Welfare Act”). Due to all of these changes, people were under the illusion that there was no harm done to any of the animals during testing. While the majority of the animals were unprotected from the