Animal Testing

Introduction

Animals should not have to suffer for the sake of testing out new products or medicines. Many of the scientists and government officials agree, animal testing should cause minimal pain and suffering as possible, and that testing on animals should be done only when necessary. Pardue states that, Replacement of animal tests, reduction in the number of animals used (currently some 20 million annually in the U.S.), and refinement of experimental procedures so as to lesson animal suffering.

Reduction means to receive maximum information from fewer animals.

Replacement means to use alternative methods other than testing on animals.

Refinement means to minimize animal pain and suffering by using alternative methods.

Animal research or otherwise know as animal testing is using non-human animals to do experiments on. Roughly there are 100 million animals used yearly and later destroyed in testing procedures conducted as part of pure research, applied research or toxicology testing most of the time in large schools or pharmaceutical companies. Testing on animal is also done on farms, army basses and health authorities, on many things from flies and rats to monkeys. Most laboratory animals are purpose bread, while a smaller number are caught in the wild or supplied by local pounds. Animal testing is always being argued concerning the ethical issues and if they are wrong or right using animals. The foundation for Biomedical Research, an American organization promotes public understanding and support for humane and responsible animal research. According to the U.S. Foundation for Biomedical Research, animal research has played a vital role in virtually every major medical advance of the last century - for both human and animal health and that many major developments that led to Nobel Prizes involved animal research, including the development of penicillin (mice), organ transplant (dogs), and work on poliomyelitis that led to a vaccine (mice, monkeys) (Animal Testing). Animal rights groups and critics of the animal model are not sure if animal testing was needed to get these results.

One moral basis for a pro-testing stance was reviewed by a British House of Lords report in 2002: the whole institution of morality, society and law is founded on the belief that human beings are unique amongst animals, Humans are therefore morally entitled to use animals, whether in the laboratory, the farmyard or the house, for their own purposes (British house of the Lords2.3). This belief is combined with a further belief that there is a moral imperative ... to develop medical and veterinary science for the relief of suffering ... and we have an ethical obligation to minimize animal distress whenever it is doable (British house of the Lords2.3). Some people also believe that animals may suffer less during experiments than human beings would, argue that although those mammals can have pain receptors and central nervous system pathways that are similar and might feel physical pain in the same way, non-human mammals suffer less because they have a reduced capacity to remember and to anticipate pain. Some of the opponents of animal testing disagree with ...