Persuasive Essay: Should Animal Testing Justified?

Each year more than 100 million animals are killed in laboratories for animal research. Whether it be to make sure a new mascara wont blind hundreds of women, or for cancer research, it is likely that animals lives will be sacrificed in order to do so. Subjected animals are forced into extreme conditions, often tortured and forced to endure treatments and tests that are unimaginable to humans, all the while deprived of everything they’ve ever known to be habitual. While many species are protected from animal research by the Animal Welfare Act, many are not. It has been widely debated as to whether animal testing is justified, or if it has been taken too far.

The Animal Welfare Act (AWA) is a law that holds a certain standard of

What most people don’t know is that the large interest in using animals in research is for the fact that they posses the human like and also non human traits needed for certain tests. For starters, most of the animals used in research are much smaller than a human, so they don’t require nearly as high a dosage of medicine to produce results. This allows scientists to hone in on their tests on a smaller and more intimate scale, doing research on non-human species while also saving millions of medical dollars. For example, a human requires 3,000 times the amount of penicillin than needed to treat a mouse, a dose much smaller and simpler to work with. Animals also possess certain traits that aid in research tremendously. For instance, scientists who do diabetic research on dogs know that insulin is common in their species and therefore they are great

What scientists have failed to account for is the fact that some advances that have been in place for years now, such as curing cancer in mice, still cannot be successfully used on humans. It is hard to believe that after so much time, and so much pain endured by so many innocent animals, in many cases there is still no transferrable progress in treatment on humans to show for it. Many publicly funded research programs involving animals are extremely flawed. This not only throwing away the lives of the animal subjects involved but also wasting millions of dollars. It has also been found that an unacceptably high percentage of recent studies have failed to randomize their animal selection, use blinding in their experiments, include the number of and characteristics of the subjected animals, or even state the study’s hypothesis or objective in the final report. These are all fundamental parts of a basic experiment, and their being left out completely discredits the entire operation, including its conductors. This huge weak spot in a large scale of experiments serves as another huge upset for the animal rights community, showing how the lives of animals are being lost all too often for poor