Persuasive Essay Against Animal Testing

📌Category: Animal rights, Animal Testing, Social Issues
📌Words: 845
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 23 April 2022

Animal testing affects over 100 million animals a year. The main animals that are used are birds, fish, monkeys, guinea pigs, hamsters, rabbits, cats, dogs, frogs, rats, and mice. These animals are used for cosmetic, drug, chemical, and food testing. These animals also struggle in medical training, biology lessons, and interest-guided experiments (“Animal Testing Facts and Statistics”). While animal testing helps researchers develop new treatments and drugs, it needs to be put to an end because it is inhumane, it is inaccurate, and there are other testing methods.

Animal testing needs to be stopped because it is harsh. First animals are put through experiments that torment them. According to Kabene, the animals undergo painful experiments for, “cosmetic and medical tests.” This needs to stop especially the non-medical animal testing that is causing animals to go through extreme amounts of pain. The way that animals suffer when they are not going through tests is also cruel. For example, Jiaa states that animals are, “storage into cramped spaces, and lack of quality/quantity in nutrition.” Even when the animals are not going through painful testing, they receive poor behavior from the people looking after them. Some of the animals that do accommodate either go through life changes that affect them for the rest of their life or the animals will be neutralized. For example, losing their eyesight, muscle coordination, and possibly even their limbs (Jiaa). Those are the results of animal testing. Animal testing is inhumane, and it needs to be stopped.

Furthermore, animal testing gives inaccurate results that are why terminating it needs to occur. According to “Pros & Cons- ProCon.org,” “94% of drugs that pass animal test fail in human trials.” This quote shows that animal testing is ineffective. More than three-fourths of the drugs that worked in animals were unsuccessful in the human trials. That makes animal testing highly imprecise. The reason this happens is that humans and animals have different biological make-ups. They have cellular, metabolic, and anatomic differences. That makes animals inadequate test subjects for humans. Also, animal testing could mislead scientists to overlook cures and treatments (“Pros & Cons - ProCon.org”). Since animal testing gives ineffective results for human experiments it needs to be stopped.       

Animal testing can be stopped because there are other alternatives to it. For example, Curtis states that, “to conduct tests on ingredients and finished products in humans under critical observation.” The quote is saying that human test subjects could be used instead of animals. Human volunteers are available for specific experiments. The human test subjects have been way more accurate than animal test subjects could ever be. Another alternative is vitro testing, which are tests done in a petri dish of human cells (“Pros & Cons - ProCon.org”). This alternative is a crucial advancement for the stopping of animal testing. The reason why is that no harm to humans or animals would be done in this alternative. Human volunteers and vitro testing are the two best alternatives to animal testing. Both would be better than animal testing because these alternatives can give more accurate results. Which would benefit humans more than testing on animals. Finding alternatives to animal testing is a major step to ending animal testing. 

There are some positives to animal testing, but the negatives far outweigh the positives. For example, it helps provide product safety for humans. It slims the chances of humans being affected by certain everyday products like cosmetics. For instance, skin irritation and even death during the human testing phase. Except animal testing would not help with this because animals have different skin and different biological make-ups than humans. Which would lead to inaccurate results, and nobody could be sure how it would genuinely affect humans till it is tested on humans. Another result of animal testing is medical advancement. Specifically, vaccines and medical procedures like open-heart surgery. Some vaccines that were tested on animals and have worked in the human trials are hepatitis B and polio. Also, by testing on animals, veterinary medicine has benefited. Doing experiments on animals gives researchers a promising idea of how that experiment is going to affect the human body (Jiaa). Except, animal testing is inaccurate and, it is hard to see what will happen until testing is done on humans.  Although animal testing is harmful and inhumane to animals there are some positives. However, there are more negatives to animal testing than there are positives.

In conclusion, animal testing needs to come to an end. First, animal testing is inhumane. It is cruel because the animals are constantly getting mistreated. Second, many of the test results are inaccurate and fail in human trials. Third, there are other alternatives to animal testing like human volunteers and vitro testing. Lastly, there are some positives to animal testing like product safety and medical improvement. Except there are more negatives to animal testing than positives and it must be stopped. Animal testing needs to be put to an end. 

Works cited

“Animal Testing Facts and Statistics.” PETA, 6 Oct. 2021, https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-experimentation/animals-used-experimentation-factsheets/animal-experiments-overview/. 

Curtis, Gary L. "An alternative to animal testing." Drug & Cosmetic Industry, vol. 150, no. 4, 

Apr. 1992, pp. 46+. Gale Academic OneFile Select, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A12092354/GPS?u=tonk7465&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=45eab0ca. Accessed 2 Nov. 2021.

Jiaa, Sherry. “The Debate on Animal Experimentation.” Sather Health, 29 Dec. 2017, https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sather/the-debate-on-animal-experimentation/. 

Kabene, Stefane, and Said Baadel. “Bioethics: A Look at Animal Testing in Medicine and Cosmetics in the UK.” Journal of Medical Ethics & History of Medicine, vol. 12, no. 1, Feb. 2019, pp. 1–11. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=145249939&site=ehost-live

“Pros & Cons - ProCon.org.” Animal Testing, 10 June 2020, animal-testing.procon.org/.

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