The Pros And Cons Of Animal Experimentation

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In the United States, more than 100 million animals are killed each year due to animal experimentation in laboratories, which is way too many. Everyday animals are burnt, sliced, poisoned with drugs, or executed during psychological testing. Animal experimentation is downright mean. Animals should not be put at risk or harmed to ensure the safety of humans.

Animal experimentation is conducted by universities, medical schools, pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies, and military defence establishments (Murnaghan). Animals are used for testing drugs, vaccines, other biologics, and medical devices to test the safety of the products (USDA). Animals are supposed to help scientists and researchers understand the human body without …show more content…

So much money is wasted each year for unreliable animal tests. The money the NIH spends every year could be going to other researches that are more cost effective and produce logical results that help us understand human body processes. Currently, there are many alternatives that are significantly cheaper and produce more accurate results. For example, a “sister chromatid exchange” animal test costs a total of $22,000. A sister chromatid exchange is the reciprocal exchange of two chromatid arms within a single chromosome (Sister). The purpose of this experiment is to find out a chemical’s ability to improve the exchange of DNA between two sister chromatids of a duplicating chromosome. Generally, young and healthy animals of any species are used for this examination. The results of this research is split right down the middle; almost half of the experiments done using this method do not work when tried on humans. This shows that these researchers have wasted money that they can never get back. On the other hand, vitro testing, which costs a total of $8,000, is used to diagnose diseases and monitor the clinical status of patients with blood, cell, or tissue samples from the patient (ProCon). “In vitro” means using the test tube method and models based on human cells and tissues (Society). Vitro testing was found to be more accurate than traditional animal tests, and it could potentially replace the need for animals in all medical science research. It would save thousands of dollars and millions of innocent animals’ lives. The amount of money spent for these researches could be going to more cost effective, reliable, and cruelty-free