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1 Kennedy Winnie Mr. Gross English 12 B (3) 9 May 2014 Animal Testing Languishing in pain, aching with loneliness, longing to roam free and use their minds, this is how millions of mice, rats, rabbits, primates, cats, dogs and other various animals go through every day. Living in fear of the next terrifying procedure they will encounter. After the life they did not chose to endure, full of pain, helplessness and fear, most end up being killed, if the test do not kill them first (“Animal Testing 101” 1). Animal testing is inhumane and must be illegal in all fifty states. Animal testing is defined as the use of non-human animals in research and development projects for purposes of determining the safety of substances such as food or drugs (“animal testing” 1). It is unethical to put millions of animals in pain. Animal test results mislead researchers’ decisions regarding cures. Also animal testing is not relevant to human health. Some people may say that animals and humans share many of the same diseases. What they do not know about are the new techniques used to test different products and/or find cures for diseases. Testing of animals is not the best choice for new drugs and other projects. Animal testing is unethical to put millions of animals in pain. Animal testing “inflicts both physical pain as well as psychological distress and suffering on large numbers of sentient creatures.” (“About Animal Testing: Humane Society International” 1). Animals do not deserve to be put through pain to help humans find cures. Society is being harmed because animal test are time consuming and resource intensive. After all the time and resources are spent the test results do not provide understanding of how the chemicals act in the body. Animals that are in 2 testing labs are not encountering real life conditions similar to humans. Many of the results do not portray real world human reactions (“About Animal Testing: Humane Society International” 1). Lawrence A. Hansen explains what happens to a rhesus monkey in a study of eye movements at the University of California San Francisco. Hansen says “for the last 20 years have undergone coil implantations in both eyes, multiple craniotomies for in-depth electrode placement, head immobilization surgeries where screws, bolts and plates are directly attached to the skull and water deprivation so that they will visually track moving objects.”(Hansen 1). The Figure A conditions rhesus monkeys have to endure just to track moving objects are ridiculous. Above in figure A from Enza, a doctor is performing a test on a rhesus monkey in the form of a shot. The monkey’s face is showing an immense amount of pain. Most citizens of the United States would not be able to watch or even glance at a picture or video of the test rhesus monkeys suffer through, a study that is not relevant to humans and does not need to be performed. Putting animals through horrifying pain, starvation and surgeries for no benefit to humans is unethical. Animal test results mislead researchers’ decisions regarding cures. Experiments on animals can contribute to illnesses or deaths in humans because the results fail to show certain effects (Barnard, Neal D., Kaufman, Stephen R 1). When researchers approve or disapprove a drug based on the results of an animal experiment, the drug could actually cause a different effect in humans than it did on the animal. The drug might have been a cure, or might have been the cause of a disease getting worse. Gina Kolata says it best when she stated, “The paper helps explain why every one of nearly 150 drugs tested at a huge expense in patients with sepsis has 3 failed. The drug tests all were based on studies in mice. And mice, it turns out, can have something that looks like sepsis in humans, but is very different from the condition in humans.” Almost one hundred and fifty different drugs were tested on patients with a certain disease and every single drug failed to cure or even help that disease. Because such drugs were only tested on mice when regarding the disease in humans and the drug passed in mice but failed to do anything in humans, this shows that animal testing misleads researchers’ decisions to approve or disapprove a certain drug for human beings. Animal testing is not relevant to human health. When running test on animals in hope to imitate what would occur to humans there are major “scientific limitations”, as said by Humane Society International, that cannot be overcome. More often than not symptoms seen in other species do not resemble such symptoms of humans. Humane Society also states “9 out of 10 candidate medicines that appear safe and effective in animal studies fail when given to humans.” When drugs approved from animal tests fail on humans because of irrelevant models, the process to find a cure in delayed and resources, including money and an innocent animal, are wasted (“About Animal Testing: Humane Society International” 1). Wasting money, time and animal lives harms society substantially. Dan Karney explains that animal testing is outdated when he says “It seems clear pharmaceutical companies and the FDA are reluctant to drop animal testing for one important reason: liability. They want to be able to say “look, we tried it on animals” if something goes wrong in the human testing phase. However, even after all that testing on animal, and then on humans, the FDA still has to recall from market hundreds and sometimes thousands of drugs per year (Kavilanz 1). Stop experimenting on animals now, it only causes suffering for them and humans do not see much benefit – if any at all.” Karney does not see the reason to cause animals pain when it does not help humans with disease cures. According to 4 Karney, animal testing is an expired method to curing human diseases. Animal testing results are irrelevant to cures for human diseases. Supporters of animal testing are convinced share many diseases with humans. According to Wright, Kazdin and Effron some of the diseases found in both animals and humans are heart disease, breast cancer, skin cancer, bone cancer, obesity and diabetes, sexually transmitted infections and erectile dysfunction. Wright, Kazdin and Effron state “For the past six years, the UCLA cardiologist has been consulting with the Los Angeles Zoo to help treat diseases found in animals. Natterson-Horowitz said she was surprised to learn how much human and veterinary medicine have in common.” Some may say because there are several diseases shared between animals and humans that animal testing is a necessary step in creating medicine. Animals may be very similar to humans but they are not the best way to test. Animals and Humans may have similar diseases but the way they are treated are different. Human tissues are a direct reflection of how a new drug may react with humans. “Industry executives say that as much as 25 percent of the drugs tested on animals failed to show side effects that later proved serious enough to prevent the drugs from being marketed. To avoid such mistakes, companies often test products on multiple species and large numbers of animals.” says Feder. Clearly animal testing does not work one-hundred percent of the time. The worst part about animal testing is companies test more and more animals on one product just to avoid mistakes (Feder 1). Animals should not be obligated to go through horrible pain while testing new drugs for humans. No matter how many diseases are found in both humans and animals, animals are not the best way to test new products used by humans. The similarity between animals and humans is a very valid point. Human cells are best way to test products when dealing with human used products. By using human cells to test 5 products, the results that show are relevant to human beings because human cells were the object tested on. In figure B to the right, the evolution of in vitro methods of testing is shown. This shows that animal testing was the only option sixty years ago. And in the past fifteen to twenty-five years human cells testing and animal testing shared the market. But the method that will take over the market is human cells testing. To test Barnaby Figure B Feder states that “Human skin, eyes, the lining of the throat — snippets of these and other tissues are now routinely grown in test tubes from donated human cells. The goal is not to patch up ailing people but to use the human tissues in place of mice, dogs or other lab animals for testing new drugs, cosmetics and other products.” As Barnaby stated human tissues are grown from donated human cells. The making of tissues is complicated but also it reduces or eliminates the use of animals for testing. People even donate themselves to get micro doses of a certain products to be analyzed (Feder 1). Because of all the alternatives for animal testing that are available, animal testing should already be abolished. There is no reason to torture animals when the best way to test products dealing with humans is by human cells. Animal testing is inhumane and must be illegal in all fifty states. It is unethical to put millions of animals in pain. Animal test results mislead researchers’ decisions regarding cures. Also animal testing is not relevant to human health. Some people may say that animals and humans share many of the same diseases. What they do not know about are the new techniques used to test different products and/or find cures for diseases. Testing of animals is not the best choice for new drugs and other projects. Animals must not encounter the pain, loneliness or lack 6 of freedom that comes from living in a testing lab. No human being would even think of having to be put through the circumstances animals involved in testing are put through. And that is why humans think animal testing is perfectly fine. The next time someone buys shampoo or any product, he/she must look at the label and check if such product was tested on animals. If that product was tested on animals and that person buys it still, he/she should be put through the same circumstances of the animal that was tested on in order to market such product.