Persuasive Essay: The Ethics Of Animal Testing

Animal testing is a very controversial topic. People use animals in our everyday lives and don’t think of how it affects the animals. The makeup people wear, the food people eat, and the chemicals that are used to clean people’s houses. It all started in the 1950’s with the development of Laboratory Animal Science. They used Russell and Burch's three R's which are replacement, reduction and refinement. They were used as guide line principles. They contribute to the welfare of the animals that are used for testing on. There was an increased interest in the testing of animals and concern about their welfare, which led to regulations in many countries and so the animal ethics committees were established. All though in all cases it is unethical

The animal that has the closest DNA as humans are chimpanzees. We share about 99% of our DNA (0). But they don’t act or look like us. Human behavior is not even close to chimpanzees. There is no feasible way that we could the drugs and chemicals that are injected and fed to these test animals could show the same affects so they would if people injected and fed them to humans. These labs are using animals for testing to get results but are expecting the results that the they get and work on humans in the exact way that they did on animals who don’t share the same behavior, looks or even DNA. Humans share 90% of their genes with cats. 82% with dogs, 80% with cows, 69% with rats and 67% with mice (0). Some of these are very close to being 100% genetically the same to humans, they simply are not the same. The only way to get exact results for humans is to use humans for testing. There are such things as human trials. These trials are voluntarily based, the people who are in these trials signed up. The animals that are in research labs are not given a choice of whether they want to experience pain, side effects and to not be in the care of a loving family. People have given more choices to themselves then they have to the animals that are possibly saving their lives. Humans make animals that don’t share even 70% of the same genetic code go through years if not the animal’s whole life of painful unnecessary testing. These test results are given more than 50% positive of which 90% of the results are false positives (0). 400 rats must go through this pain just so that humans can get false positives for their chemicals and drugs that humans use every