Persuasive Essay On Animal Testing

The term animal testing refers to procedures performed on living animals for purposes of research. The testing is used to research basic biology and diseases, to evaluate the efficiency of new medicinal products, and test the human health and environmental safety of consumer and industry products such as cosmetics, household cleaners, food additives, pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals. All procedures, even those classified as “mild,” have the potential to cause the animals physical as well as psychological distress and suffering. Often the procedures can cause a great deal of suffering. Most animals are killed at the end of an experiment, but some may be reused in subsequent experiments (Humane Society, 2016). Animal testing is by no

The National Research Council in the United States has expressed its vision of “a not-so-distant future in which virtually all routine toxicity testing would be conducted in human cells or cell lines”, and science leaders around the world have reaffirmed this view. The sequencing of the human genome and birth of functional genomics, the explosive growth of computer power and computational biology, and high-speed robot automation of cell-based screening systems, to name a few, has sparked a quiet revolution in biology. Together, these innovations have produced new tools and ways of thinking that can help uncover exactly how chemicals and drugs disrupt normal processes in the human body at the level of cells and molecules. From there, scientists can use computers to interpret and integrate this information with data from human and population level studies. The resulting predictions regarding human safety and risk are potentially more relevant to people in the real world than animal tests. The wider field of human health research could benefit from a similar shift in theory. Many disease areas have seen little or no progress despite decades of animal research. Some 300 million people currently suffer from asthma, yet only two types of

Many different species are used around the world, but the most common include mice, fish, rats, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, farm animals, birds, cats, dogs, pigs, and non-human primates. It is estimated that more than 115 million animals worldwide are used in laboratory experiments every year. But because only a small proportion of countries collect and publish data concerning animal use for testing and research, the precise number is unknown. For example, in the United States, up to 90 percent of the animals used in laboratories are excluded from the official statistics, meaning that figures published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture are no doubt a substantial underestimate (Claire,