Ethical Issues In Animal Testing

There are an estimated 26 million animals used every year in the United States for scientific and commercial testing. Animals are used to develop medical treatments to determine whether the medications are toxic and check the safety of the products created for human use. Much research has been done on living animals and has been practiced since at least 500BC. Animal testing was enabled for the development of many life-saving treatments for both humans and animals. The animals which are mainly used in experiments are mice, rats, fish, chickens, rabbits, dogs and primates.

Animals have been used for years in experimentation which dates back to ancient times. It has been happening since at least 500s BCE, when a Greek philosopher and scientist

Advances in biology began in 1800s have provided some of the strongest arguments for imbuing animals with an enhanced moral value. In 1959, William Russell and Rex Burch published a book which emphasized the ethical issues involved. The research of animal use continued to increase, raising serious ethical and scientific issues. The dimensions of animal testing has been explored and found that there are ethical implications involved. There especially is issues when pharmaceutical research and development and regulatory toxicity testing. There is an ethical problem with how they test on animals but they are trying to make it as humane as possible. The animals which are being used for experimentation are beginning to become very different because their social behaviours are starting to change. They are finding different ways of coping in cages in the laboratories. Animals in nature are normally very social but when they are used for experimentation they start to become anti-social. They don’t get to act like animals they get made to sit in cages and go through extreme pain for scientific use. The animals become detached and they are just trying to

There are many opinions on this subject such as animal testing has contributed too many life-saving cures and treatments. The California Biomedical Research Association states that nearly every medical breakthrough in the last 100 years has resulted directly from research using experiments. Experiments in which dogs had their pancreases removed led directly to the discovery of insulin, critical to saving lives of diabetics. The polio vaccine, tested on animals, reduced the global occurrence of the disease from 350,000 cases in 1988 to 223 cases in 2012. Animal research has also contributed to major advances in understanding and treating conditions such as breast cancer, brain injury, childhood leukaemia, cystic fibrosis, malaria, multiple sclerosis, tuberculosis and many others. It was instrumental in the development of pacemakers, cardiac valve substitutes and anaesthetics. Whereas another opinion is against the experimentation on animals they think that it is cruel and inhumane. There are now alternative methods which can replace the need for animals. In vitro testing, such as studying cell cultures in a petri dish, can produce more relevant information and results than animal testing. This is because human cells can be used. Micro dosing, the administering of doses too small to cause adverse reactions, can be used in human volunteers, whose blood is then analysed. Computer models such as virtual