Why is animals testing bad

The science relating to animal experiments can be extremely complicated and views often differ. What appears on this website represents Cruelty Free International expert opinion, based on a thorough assessment of the evidence.

Search form Search. His life will be a short one and will end when his body can no longer handle the disease. The drug that he sacrificed his life to test will likely fail to move forward to the next phase of trials, making his suffering effectively meaningless. Unfortunately, he is but one of the millions of animals that suffer in labs around the world every year. Animal testing is generally performed in the production of either cosmetics or medicine.

The aim is to help establish whether these products are safe for humans, by examining their effects on animals. Whether to test cosmetics and other beauty products on animals is left up to the manufacturer in the United States, and is not required by the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The only country that does require animal testing for some cosmetic products is China, where particular products such as hair dye and sunscreen must be tested on animals if being marketed in the country.

Animal testing for medical purposes takes place at virtually every research university in the United States. Animals are used as subjects prior to new medications or procedures being tested in people, during the preclinical phase of drug development.

Records of using animal models for research date back to early Greek scientists including Aristotle, who performed experiments on animals. Ibn Zuhr, an Arab physician, is the first known to have used animal models in experimental surgical procedures prior to attempting the surgeries on humans, in the 12th century. In more recent years, the use of animals for medical research has been a topic of much debate.

This debate has led to the passage of laws regulating animal use in a number of countries including Japan, New Zealand, and Brazil. In the U. Different animals are used for different types of experiments, but some of the most frequently used animals globally are rats, mice, birds, fish, cats, dogs, nonhuman primates, and farmed animals. When it comes to research, invertebrates are considered to have several benefits over vertebrates. The first of these is that regulations pertaining to welfare and care standards often do not apply to invertebrates, meaning that researchers are able to save time and resources by avoiding lengthy paperwork.

So the equation is completely useless as a way of deciding whether it is ethically acceptable to perform an experiment, because until the experiment is carried out, no-one can know the value of the benefit that it produces. Most ethicists think that we have a greater moral responsibility for the things we do than for the things we fail to do; i.

For example: we think that the person who deliberately drowns a child has done something much more wrong than the person who refuses to wade into a shallow pool to rescue a drowning child. In the animal experiment context, if the experiment takes place, the experimenter will carry out actions that harm the animals involved.

If the experiment does not take place the experimenter will not do anything. This may cause harm to human beings because they won't benefit from a cure for their disease because the cure won't be developed. And so if we want to continue with the arithmetic that we started in the section above, we need to put an additional, and different, factor on each side of the equation to deal with the different moral values of acts and omissions.

One writer suggests that we can cut out a lot of philosophising about animal experiments by using this test:. Sadly, there are a number of examples where researchers have been prepared to experiment on human beings in ways that should not have been permitted on animals.

And another philosopher suggests that it would anyway be more effective to research on normal human beings:. Whatever benefits animal experimentation is thought to hold in store for us, those very same benefits could be obtained through experimenting on humans instead of animals. Indeed, given that problems exist because scientists must extrapolate from animal models to humans, one might think there are good scientific reasons for preferring human subjects.

If those human subjects were normal and able to give free and informed consent to the experiment then this might not be morally objectionable. In November the European Union put forward proposals to revise the directive for the protection of animals used in scientific experiments in line with the three R principle of replacing, reducing and refining the use of animals in experiments.

The proposals have three aims:. The proposed directive covers all live non-human vertebrate animals intended for experiments plus certain other species likely to experience pain, and also animals specifically bred so that their organs or tissue can be used in scientific procedures. The proposal also introduces a ban on the use of great apes - chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans - in scientific procedures, other than in exceptional circumstances, but there is no proposal to phase out the use of other non-human primates in the immediate foreseeable future.

Search term:. Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience.

Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets CSS if you are able to do so. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. Making human's lives better should not be justification for torturing and exploiting animals. The value that humans place on their own lives should be extended to the lives of animals as well. Still other people think that animal testing is acceptable because animals are lower species than humans and therefore have no rights.

These individuals feel that animals have no rights because they lack the capacity to understand or to knowingly exercise these rights. However, animal experimentation in medical research and cosmetics testing cannot be justified on the basis that animals are lower on the evolutionary chart than humans since animals resemble humans in so many ways. Many animals, especially the higher mammalian species, possess internal systems and organs that are identical to the structures and functions of human internal organs.

Also, animals have feelings, thoughts, goals, needs, and desires that are similar to human functions and capacities, and these similarities should be respected, not exploited, because of the selfishness of humans. Tom Regan asserts that "animals are subjects of a life just as human beings are, and a subject of a life has inherent value. They are. Therefore, animals' lives should be respected because they have an inherent right to be treated with dignity.

The harm that is committed against animals should not be minimized because they are not considered to be "human. In conclusion, animal testing should be eliminated because it violates animals' rights, it causes pain and suffering to the experimental animals, and other means of testing product toxicity are available.

Humans cannot justify making life better for themselves by randomly torturing and executing thousands of animals per year to perform laboratory experiments or to test products. Animals should be treated with respect and dignity, and this right to decent treatment is not upheld when animals are exploited for selfish human gain. After all, humans are animals too. Orlans, F. New York: Oxford UP, Silcock, Sheila. Save the Animals: Stop Animal Testing.