Member name:

Ngov Sreynich
Vong Pisey
Sovanna Monika

Should animals be used in experiments/testing?

Nowadays, many cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies use animals for various
experimental testing as part of their product development research projects. By this operation, a
company could test if any toxic chemicals in the products could harm people. The testing is to
provide their consumers with safer and more effective products. On the other hand, many
animals are being abused by these operations. Although both arguments have valid points, I
personally believe that using animals for experimenting is not ethical and should be avoided.
To begin with, Animals should not be used in experiment or testing according to three
main reasons. First of all, using animals in the experiment is very expensive. It assumed that
more innovative technology will be even more expensive. Likewise, National Institute of Health
(NIH), which allocates 40% of its annual research budget to animal experiments caused more
than $16 billion. On the hand, Ohio State University spend $1.9 million for cruel heart attack
experiments on dogs. These show that human is very cruel, instead of using the budget for the
nation’s elderly such as Medicare and for medicine they rather spend it on the animals
experiment.
Secondly, animals and people are alike in many ways, they both feel, think, behave, and
experience pain. Thus, animals should be treated with the same respect as humans. Yet animals'
rights are violated when they are used in research because they are not given a choice. Animals
are subjected to tests that are often painful or cause permanent damage or death, and they are
never given the option of not participating in the experiment. Regan further says, for example,
that "animal [experimentation] is morally wrong no matter how much humans may benefit
because the animal's basic right has been infringed. Risks are not morally transferable to those
who do not choose to take them" (qtd. in Orlans 26). Animals do not willingly sacrifice
themselves for the advancement of human welfare and new technology. Their decisions are made
for them because they cannot vocalize their own preferences and choices. When humans decide
the fate of animals in research environments, the animals' rights are taken away without any
thought of their well-being or the quality of their lives. Therefore, animal experimentation should
be stopped because it violates the rights of animals.
Lastly, the harmful use of animals in experiments is not only cruel but also often
ineffective. Animals do not get many of the human diseases that people do, such as major types
of heart disease, many types of cancer, HIV, Parkinson’s disease, or schizophrenia.  Instead,
signs of these diseases are artificially induced in animals in laboratories in an attempt to mimic
the human disease. Yet, such experiments belittle the complexity of human conditions which are
affected by wide-ranging variables such as genetics, socio-economic factors, deeply-rooted
psychological issues and different personal experiences. It is not surprising to find that
treatments showing ‘promise’ in animals rarely work in humans. Not only are time, money and
animals’ lives being wasted (with a huge amount of suffering), but effective treatments are being
mistakenly discarded and harmful treatments are getting through. The support for animal testing
is based largely on anecdote and is not backed up, we believe, by the scientific evidence that is
out there. Despite many decades of studying conditions such as cancer, Alzheimer’s disease,
Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, stroke and AIDS in animals, we do not yet have reliable and fully
effective cures. But still, many people believe that animal testing is justified because the animals
are sacrificed to make products safer for human use and consumption. However, animal
experimentation in medical research and cosmetics testing cannot be justified on the basis that
animals are lower on the evolutionary chart than humans since animals resemble humans in so
many ways.
In conclusion, animal testing should be eliminated because it violates animals' rights, it
causes pain and suffering to the experimental animals, and other means of testing product
toxicity are available. Humans cannot justify making life better for themselves by randomly
torturing and executing thousands of animals per year to perform laboratory experiments or to
test products. Animals should be treated with respect and dignity, and this right to decent
treatment is not upheld when animals are exploited for selfish human gain. After all, humans are
animals too.