Animal testing has been a common medical practice for the last decades to ensure the safety of humans before putting medicines into use. Recently, there has been a rising population of protesters claiming that vivo testing is inhumane and brutal and should be eradicated. This essay will delve into the arguments of both views and my personal opinion on this topic.
Animal experimentation is claimed to be a necessary evil since laboratory animals are the only suitable subjects for their strong similarities with human beings and short life cycles. Firstly, animals are used to test the effectiveness of medicines due to their close resemblance to humans’ biological structures and behaviours. Research shows that chimpanzees share 99% of their DNA with humans while the ratio is 98% in mice. For such genetic similarity, they are expected to be susceptible to common diseases and conditions in humans, as a result, biologically react to drugs the same way as we do. Moreover, animals make better research subjects compared to human beings for their short life spans and rapid reproduction speed. Common experiment subjects such as mice, rats or rabbits can only live for 2 to 3 years, thus, scientists can easily study the effects of treatment throughout their whole life spans or across several generations.
On the other hand, opponents of animal testing claim that research subjects are often treated poorly but can result in little to no efficiency. To study the effectiveness of procedures, giving laboratory animals illnesses is a common practice. Humans classify themselves as a higher class animal, nevertheless, they have no rights to subject other animals to this kind of trauma and the lives of all creatures should be respected. Besides, despite the considerable resemblance with humans, many animals do not suffer from many human diseases, hence, signs of these diseases are artificially induced in animals in order to mimic human diseases. However, such experiments cannot simulate the complexity of wide-ranging factors affecting the conditions, leading to low accuracy rate, as shown in a recent study that using mice and rats to measure the safety of drugs in humans only works 43% of the time.
In short, animal experiment is still an efficient way to measure the treatment effectiveness when it is infeasible to use human subjects. Nonetheless, scientists should not abuse the power to carry out such ruthless research, for the sake of the lives of other creatures. Animal testing is only reasonable if suffering is minimised using less invasive techniques.