The shocking facts behind animal testing

There are many disagreements in the world of research, but few debates will get as heated as those surrounding animal testing. Many scientists and research advocates contend that animal experiments are crucial for learning about basic biology and disease mechanisms, and are necessary for testing the safety and efficacy of new medicines and chemicals. Opponents, meanwhile, contend that subjecting animals to experiments for human gain is ethically unjustified. What’s more, many argue, such research is often misleading because it compares apples and oranges: results from animal studies often don’t translate to humans because the animals are just too different.

Testing on animals doesn’t make anything easier to researchers to discover appropriate drugs and treatments for humans. Some animals die during experiments because some drugs and treatments are harmful to animals. Thousands of people die annually from drugs tested on animals. Animals do not get many of the human diseases like people do such as heart diseases, HIV, many types of cancers and so on. It’s very sad and depressing to see what animals go through for human experiments and they have no clue about what we are doing to them. Results made by an animal do not accurately determine how humans will react due to differences between their body structures and how their body processes. Sometimes animal tests are not useful and animal testing is expensive.

ALTERNATE METHODS

Society might have allowed animal testing as a ‘necessary evil’ after being convinced that there is no other way to find cures for human diseases or make drugs and cosmetic products safe. Yet the truth is animal testing is cruel and costly, and with the advancement of science and technology, decent alternatives to animal testing are now available.

The most significant trend in modern research is the recognition that animals rarely serve as good models for the human body. Human clinical and epidemiological studies, human tissue- and cell-based research methods, sophisticated high-fidelity human-patient simulators, and computational models have the potential to be more reliable, more precise, less expensive, and more humane alternatives to experiments on animals.
‘In vitro testing’ is another excellent auxiliary to animal experimentation, in which cellular tests take place inside a test tube. ‘Organs on chips’ is an innovative little device that helps scientists study the human biological system, drug metabolism, and diseases.

CONCLUSION

Millions of animals, including dogs, cats, rats, mice, rabbits, pigs, and many others, are sacrificed in the name of scientific research. It really is a genuine tragedy that makes it crucial to understand that the choice is not between humans and animals, but it is between good science and bad science. Thus, concluding it to the point that animal testing should be comprehensively banned because it violates fundamental animal rights and causes nothing but pain and suffering.