Scobee 1

Alysa Scobee
Professor McKeever
11/24/14
101H English
Word Count: 692

Should Authorities Ban the use of Animals for research?

Did you know that 95% of animals used in experiments are not protected by the federal
Animal Welfare Act, which excludes birds, rats and mice bred for research, and cold-blooded
animals such as reptiles and most fish? Every year an estimated 26 million animals are used in
the United States for scientific and commercial testing. These animals are used to develop
medical treatments, determine the toxicity of medicines, check the safety of products destined to
be for human use as well as other biochemical, commercial, and health care uses. Before their
deaths, animals are sometimes forced to inhale toxic fumes, other animals are immobilized in
restraint devices for hours, some have holes drilled into their skulls, and others have their skin
burned off or even their spinal cords crushed.
In addition to the torment of the actual experiments, animals are deprived of everything
that is natural and important. Animals are confined to barren cages, socially isolated, and
psychologically traumatized. Animals should not be used for scientific or commercial testing
because it is inhumane and unnecessary. Even diseases that are artificially induced in labs are
never identical to those that are in humans. And because animal species differ from one another
biologically in many significant ways, it becomes more and more unlikely that animal
experiments will have results that will be correctly interpreted and applied to humans in a
meaningful ways.

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Animal testing is cruel and inhumane, but is still being used to this day. But pros to
animal testing say that animal testing has contributed to life-saving treatments and cures. Nearly
every medical breakthrough in the last one hundred years resulted from using animals. From the
discovery of insulin, to the polio vaccine, even to major advances in understanding and treating
breast cancer, brain injuries, childhood leukemia, cystic fibrosis, malaria, sclerosis, and
tuberculosis were found in experimenting on animals. Without animal research and testing,
scientists say that they never would have found the cure for hepatitis B without chimpanzees, and
still using chimps is their best hope for finding a vaccine for Hepatitis C, which kills 15,000
people in the United States every year.
But the way that scientists test on these animals is wrong. These animals are given no
anesthesia, they are restrained, and they are killed without a second thought. There are now
alternative testing methods that can replace animal testing. One is in glass testing, studying cell
cultures in a petri dish, which can produce more relevant results because human cells can be
used. Another way is Micro Dosing. This is administering doses that are too small to cause
reactions that can be used on human volunteers and their blood can be tested. There is now
artificial human skin, made from human skin cells grown in test tubes and plastic wells that can
give more useful and productive results than testing on Animal skin. Scientists have created
"organs on a chip", or Microfluidic chips that are lined with human cells and can recreate the
functions of human organs, but these are still be developed. All these alternate testing ideas can
be used instead of animals. Animals should be free of pain and of suffering of these inhumane
tests. Computers don't have feelings, nor can they be hurt. These are more logical to use that
animals that do have feelings.

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Therefore, because animal testing is inhumane, animals are very different from humans
and make poor test subjects, and there are alternate ways to test for diseases and find cures for
diseases, should animals not be tested on anymore. The world should fund these alternate ways
of testing instead of funding for scientists and labs to test and hurt animals. And people should
also protest these animal labs and scientists. The government should create more strict laws,
animals have rights that should be upheld like the human beings of this world fight for to this
day.

Works Cited
"Animal Testing." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 23 Nov. 2014. Web. 24 Nov. 2014.
"Animal Testing - ProCon.org." ProConorg Headlines. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Nov. 2014.