Nowadays, with the rising concern about animals’ welfare and environmental protection, many people are questioning the usage of experiments on animals in science. In this essay, it will be shown that testing some special products on animals is needed in order to not jeopardize the life of customers, but also what our modern socity currently develops to get rid of those outdated methods, especially thanks to AI technologies and human testing.
First of all, it is well-known that ensuring the safety of medicines or sanitary products for humans relies on a bunch of experimentations on animals. A first example is the process of creation of vaccins to fight against illnesses such as the Coronavirus. Indeed, during the pandemics, when the population and governments were not sure to what extent this sickness was life-threatening, they immediately invested billions of euros (in Europe) to develop a vaccin. This one took only a year and a half to be created, which could be achieved only by means of a lot of tests on animals, in order to accelerate the process. The same holds for sanitary products, especially those dedicated to babies. Thus, humankind’s sake justifies the usage of experiments on animals in science, especially in medicine, although it endangers animals’ welfare.
But, at the same time, alternatives were developed by researchers to find trades-off between the well-being of all kind of living species, animals as well as humans, by improving new technologies.
For instance, AI and neural networks now allow humankind to collect data about any type of living body, sickness, or previous experiments done on animals, since decades. Even if this huge database is not yet fully furnished, it can still start giding scientists in their research and prevents unnecessary animal suffering. More precisely, some models like Petri Nets have been developed in the last 50 years to allow scientists to extract a lot of information from few experiments and be able to generalize those results. Even if this is widely used to model smaller behaviours like chemical reactions, one can easily imagine that, in the future, it could replace multiple experiments by fewer and better-chosen ones. Hence, new technologies like AI could replace the majority of experiments in a near future.
To conclude, testing products on animals before testing them on humans is justified to avoid humans’ deaths but needs to be limited to only vital products. In parallel, development of technologies like AI could replace a significant part of the experiments and avoid wasted deaths.