Courtney Macker C.

Douglas ENGL-1102-093 4/7/14 Persuasive Essay

Animal testing has been challenging topic to discuss. There are many people that want animal testing to continue and there are many people who believe that there should be a stop to animal testing. Animals are suffering daily, but new medications are created to help human health. Why does it continue? Millions of animals are tortured and killed in horrid ways for nothing. They are burned, cut, poisoned, and more. Laboratories claim they are providing new medicines, but only about 21 drugs are approved yearly and most of those are copy-cat drugs. Even fewer drugs are being approved every year and there has been an increase in cosmetics testing. There are plenty of cosmetics, so the continuation of cosmetics testing is unnecessary. There are many tests that are useless such as the lethal drug test. Animals are given different amounts of poisonous chemicals to find out how much of the chemical it takes to kill a person. During a test to find out how blind and deaf people respond to stimulus, kittens brains were severed to cut off their senses. The blind and deaf disapproved of this test. Scientists claim that they are being treated humanely and given pain relievers. PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, went undercover to film inside the labs. The animals were not given medication and they were tossed around and mistreated. Not all labs were as inhumane as others, but they all mistreated the animals in some way. They claim that

they are not human therefor; it is ethical to experiment on them. The Humane Society says that if they are not human, then why do we test on them? They are not anatomically the same except for the fact that they have feelings and they have the same sensory organs. They can feel pain just like we can. Scientists say that they are great test subjects because they are anatomically similar to humans. Monkeys share 98% of the same genetic material and mice share 95% of the same genetic material. At a quick glance, these numbers look good. Humans are 99.9% genetically similar, yet everyone is so much different. No two people are the same, not even identical twins. If .1% could cause such a large difference, than what is to say 2% or even 5% tells us we have a lot in common. The truth is mice and monkeys are more different from us than they are alike. In fact, only 10% of the drugs deemed safe on animals work on humans. Animals are not great test subjects. There are more errors with animal testing than any alternative method. Animal testing is expensive and a waste of precious lives. Animal testing is not only morally wrong, but a waste of time, money, and effort. Many companies have already ended animal testing for their products and are using safer methods. Human lives are not being saved because new drugs are not being produced and the old drugs are just being renamed. Animal testing is not only cruel, but it is also pointless.