It is often argued that animal testing for medical purposes is crucial, while others hold a belief that it is an inhumane action. While such testing can help protect human lives, I firmly believe that it is unethical and should be replaced by other experiment alternatives.
On the one hand, animal testing is important because it plays a vital role in achieving an experimental result before putting medical drugs into practice. If trials are not conducted quantitatively enough, the obtained result will be unreliable, increasing the skepticism among people and the risks of patients’ health. Therefore, testing on animals provides an effortless approach which yields experimental results without any fatal flaw. As animals like mice or guinea pigs share biological and physiological similarities with human, conducting experiments on them potentially provide relatively reliable and valid insight into the mechanism of drugs in human body and predicting their side effects. Hence, animal testing enables researchers to come up with more accurate solutions and effective drugs, minimising severe health consequences and even loss of life.
On the other hand, animal testing has been causing millions of animals death. Animals are used to mimic human diseases even though these illnesses do not naturally occur in them which possibly deviate the experimental data, resulting in the inaccuracy and imprecision of result. Under laboratory environment, experimented animals are force-fed pesticides, chemical drugs and subjected to prolonged suffering in the pursuit of experimenting, undoubtedly raising serious concerns about ethical consideration. Additionally, animal testing is becoming unnecessary as there are more viable alternatives. 3D technology illustration, gene-editing strategy and lab-grown human cells utilise human cells, the advancement of technology and artificial intelligence to provide safer, more accurate and ethical approach to invent medical drugs before applying on human. These experiment methods are more humane and are proven to produce reliable results in certain medical diseseas.
In conclusion, I firmly believe that animal testing should be curbed as it is inhumane and against the normal standards of morality. Technological alternatives will replace traditional animal testing in the future due to their reliability and validity of collecting and analysing data.