Persuasive Essay Against Animal Testing

People have different feelings towards animals, most people look upon animals as their loving companions while others view them as a simple means for advancing medical techniques or furthering experimental research. One matter that is always overlooked is the fact that animals feel pain in many of the same ways that humans do. Animals get excited, happy, and scared just like humans. After all, humans are animals too. Imagine being taken away from your family and subjected to many different procedures that only cause pain and suffering. This is the everyday life of a test animal, being forced to live a life while deliberately sickened with toxic chemicals or infected with diseases for the “benefit” of another species. In 2004, the FDA estimated that ninety-two percent of drugs that pass preclinical tests, including “pivotal” animal tests, fail to proceed to the market. More recent analyses show an increase in failure rate closer to ninety-six (Akhtar). With a failure rate of ninety-six percent, would you subject yourself to these procedures? More than a hundred million animals are killed every year for a mere success rate of four percent. With today’s advancements in technology, the need for animal testing should be obsolete as there are many new and improved methods for testing that are humane and efficient.

Aside from the ethical issues animal testing pose, animal testing is a time and resource-intensive procedure that is restricted to the number of substances that can be assessed and to the knowledge of how chemicals behave in the human body (Humane Society International). In many cases, animal testing doesn’t correctly predict human reactions, this is because diseases or substances injected in animals are never identical to those injected in humans. Animal species differ from one another biologically, making it highly unlikely that animal testing will yield results that will be correctly interpreted and applied to the human condition. The interspecies differences in physiology, behavior, pharmacokinetics, and genetics significantly limit the reliability of animal testing. As a result, animal testing has become an unreliable and inefficient method of testing.

Apart from animal testing, there are numerous alternatives that are humane and efficient. In-vitro studies, computer-modeling systems, and studies with human volunteers are three examples of these alternatives to animal testing. In-vitro studies are studies of biological properties, such as blood or tissue samples that were taken from the human body, which are done inside a test tube rather than in a human or animal. In-vitro studies can be used to detect diseases and monitor a person’s health to help cure and prevent diseases. Compared to animal testing, in-vitro studies offer higher speed and greater accuracy when testing. Computer-modeling systems offer stimulations of the human biology and the progression of developing diseases that can accurately predict ways that new drugs will react in the human body. Studies with human volunteers such as micro-dosing can provide vital information on the safety of an experimental drug and how it metabolizes in humans. Micro-dosing involves giving volunteers an extremely small one-time drug dose with sophisticated imaging technology to monitor how the drug will behave in the human body.

To conclude, animal testing is an inhumane and inefficient procedure that should be left in the past. With many new and improved methods, the need for animal testing has become obsolete. Methods such as in-vitro, computer-modeling systems, and studies with human volunteers, have shown a greater accuracy when it comes to testing. Not only do these methods show great accuracy but they also perform humanely.