Ethical Debate On Using Animals For Science Research

There has been heavy argument with animal experiment between defenders of animal rights and people who consider laboratory animals as a necessary evil for the advancement of science. Curing a lot of diseases, and biomedical advancement would have not been possible till date without tests on animals.

When a research has been done on animal and it fails, then it means it is dangerous on humans but a lot of people want to see a plan to phase out this research on animals. Before animals were used, there was a time humans were made lab rats especially those who were condemned to death but with modern science, we have come to agree that it is unethical for humans to be used as test objects but then what about animals such as mice and monkeys.

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I remembered my friend purchasing rats for lab research work and when she made a mistake in the feeding for the rats that were used her supervisor would tell her to dispose off the rats by ensuring she exterminates them after which she would buy another set of rats and do the test from the beginning. Over the period of the test, she used a whole lot of lab rats that she became tired of using them and was worried for what the animals were going through.

Thousands of Monkeys are exported from countries like Mauritaus for lab researches in different cities and countries around the world. If there is an accident leading to the escape of any of the lab animals, they might end up being killed by people if they go into cities but then, we could say that they are the lucky ones because they will not go through the science procedure that could lead to their life ending terribly.

We have been dissecting and vivisecting animals for thousands of years as far back as 6BCE and this was in the search to understand what was in human's body but believes and taboos prevented them from opening up humans. In the 16th century, Vesalius realized that we were not completely anatomically similar with animals and he got his conclusion by dissecting human cadavers which was what led to more accurate description of human anatomy.

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After world war 2, the world created guidelines for ethical researches which prevented the use of human subjects for experiments and in the process of following these guidelines, non-human subjects have continued to rise and this substitute is not close enough humanity and being humane.

In bio-medical researches, using animals fail more times than it works and this happens over 95% of time and more interestingly, about 90% of drugs tested on animals and found to be safe on them turn out not to be safe when tested in humans. We can agreed that the use of animals as substitute to humans is not scientifically justified. The believe that human are more valuable with animal lives worth little and have less moral value is one reason why a lot of people use animals for tests just like they use test tubes.

If over 1 million animals excluding mice, fishes and rats are used lab research then something needs to be done but what are we going to turn to as an alternative because the course of science needs to continue?

^REFERENCE

^{https://www.physiology.org/career/policy-advocacy/animal-research
https://www.lonestar.edu/stopanimaltesting.htm
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218267/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/animals/using/experiments_1.shtml
https://med.stanford.edu/animalresearch/why-animal-research.html
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9710398/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2002542/
https://www.forskningsetikk.no/en/guidelines/}