PERSUASIVE ESSAY

Audience: This paper would appear in Scientific American Magazine.  This paper potentially draws those within the science and technology fields who possess the potential to consider methods used in their everyday settings concerning research by experimentation.

 

Laboratory Animals and Their Consequences

Imagine that beginning from the time you were born you are watched and examined carefully.  You are separated from your mother at a very early age.  You are put on a specific diet, including ingesting unhealthy substances or being deprived of food.  You are forced to perform specific activities each day and night, including being poked, prodded, electrocuted, and more.  You live your entire life in a cold, metal cage, never having a chance to see sunlight or greenery.  Finally, after your physical and psychological suffering, you are intentionally killed.  This is the reality of tens of millions of animals for the purpose of biomedical research, and they have no choice but to be subject to this cruel and unusual form of life by human hands.  If humans were treated in this manner, there would surely be a tremendous outcry worldwide; unfortunately, for other species, their cries are unnoticed every day.  It is even commonplace in the United States to hear terms like “lab rat” or “guinea pig” to reference one who is experimented upon.  For the benefit of humans and animals alike, animals should not be used for biomedical research testing.  Using animals for testing is inhumane, nonhuman animals are poor comparisons to human beings, and alternative testing methods can be used in place of living creatures.

Many people may not realize the incredibly cruel procedures used in laboratories which experiment upon animals, because instances of this are rarely seen in the media.  However, few cases are ever widely heard about because an astonishing 95% of animals used for research are not protected by the Animal Welfare Act.  Of the approximately 25 million animals used in American laboratories in the year 2010, only about 1 million were covered by this act.  Types of animals not covered include rats, birds, fish, and mice (“Animal Testing Pros and Cons”).  It is noticeably difficult to find statistics on exactly how many animals receive pain during experiments, as scientists are not required to report this for rats, mice, birds, or aquatic species other than marine mammals – the 95% of species not covered by the Animal Welfare Act.  Excluding these, in 2010, 436,892 animals out of 1,134,693 suffered pain due to laboratory resesarch (“Animal Research and Pain”).  The forms of heartbreaking procedures common for them are numerous.  They are exposed to drugs and diseases that cause pain and death, including cancer, stroke, and depression; genetic manipulation, to test genetic diseases; ear-notching and tail-clipping, simply for identification; physical restraint; electric shock; infliction of wounds; surgical procedures; food and water deprivation; oral force-feeding; forced chemical exposure for toxicity testing; and killing through gaseous asphyxiation, decapitation, and neck-breaking.  This list is not complete and includes only known methods (“About Animal Testing”).

How animals are obtained for experimentation vary.  Most animals are bred for the specific purpose for laboratory research.  These are known as class A dealers in the United States of America.  Class B dealers are those who obtain animals from locations such as auctions, newspaper ads, and animal shelters.  The practice of taking animals from shelters in referred to as “pound seizures,” and laws for this vary by state.  Some prohibit seizures, some require shelters to give up animals for experiments, and some have no laws at all.  Additionally, many animals are directly taken from the wild.  Monkeys, mice, rats, and birds can have this happen to them.  As for when an experiment ends, the majority of animals are simply euthanized when the experiment is finished.  Laboratories are not required to report when an animal is killed, so no accurate statistics are readily available.  Animals also commonly die as a result of the experiment, whether it is by accident or on purpose.  Animals are rarely adopted or placed into sanctuaries when experiments end (“Questions and Answers About Biomedical Research”).

Proponents of laboratory animals may argue that there is a distinct difference between nonhuman animals and humans, and that is the presence of morality in our society – the ability for humans to tell right from wrong.  Animals lack the ability to read, write, and understand moral choices, so why should they deserve the same treatment as humans receive when we are supposedly a superior species?  One book, The Ethics of Animal Research, presents a reasonable objection to this claim.  They recall one case of a mental health facility, the now closed Willowbrook State Hospital, which conducted a series of hepatitis experiments upon the hospital’s severely retarded children for fifteen years.  These children were as young as three years old.  Some received an injection and were fed the live hepatitis virus; the others were fed the virus without the injection.  The head professor leading the experiment, Professor Saul Krugman, found results presenting that there were two distinct hepatitis viruses the children were able to contract.  The symptoms experienced by patients included fatigue, loss of appetite, malaise, abdominal pain, vomiting, headache, intermittent fever, jaundice, swollen liver, and death in up to 10 percent of the cases (Garrett).  Was this experiment cruel?  These children could not read, write, or understand moral choices -- much like animals cannot do these things.  However, today Dr. Krugman’s experiment is seen as horrific, and the practice of hurting and killing animals in sometimes worse manners is nationally accepted in the United States.  Therefore, the perspective of humans deserving greater rights than nonhuman animals based on a moral standpoint is incongruous with logical thinking.

Another reason why animals should not be involved in biomedical research testing is because animals are poor models of human characteristics.  It is visually apparent that nonhuman animals do not have the same physiological and biological makeup as humans.  As concluded by the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, “Animals have proven to be poor models for human disease research. Because they are genetically different from humans, studying diseases in animals can give us inadequate or erroneous information” (“Animal Use in Research”).  They go on further to quote Dr. Richard Klausner, former director of the National Cancer Institute, who states that “The difficulties associated with using animal models for human disease result from the metabolic, anatomic, and cellular differences between humans and other creatures.”  

One problem which arises because of these differences between animals and humans includes the economic expenditures of experiments.  The NEAVS estimates that the sum cost of testing and drug development and for it to be placed into the market ranges from $800 million up to $1 billion.  To test one batch of a therapeutic protein on mice, for example, costs around $2.5 million alone.  With its over 25 million test subjects, the United States of America spends the most worldwide on animal-oriented biomedical research.  What worsens these statistics is that only 5% of drugs which had significant results in animals are eventually allowed for human use, making the other 95% all disappointing cases of trial and error.  One study done in 2013 by Dr. John Pippin outlines this issue:

“Unknown to most of the public, entire fields of medical discovery have derived little or nothing of value for humans from decades of animal experimentation. Many of the major causes of morbidity and mortality among humans are eye-opening examples of this failure of animal experimentation, including but not limited to HIV/AIDS, stroke, cancers, menopausal hormone therapy, spinal cord injury (paralysis); and numerous other neurological, immunological, cardiovascular, and endocrine (most prominently diabetes mellitus) diseases.” (Pippin)

In some instances, animal testing may mislead the overall results of an experiment, ignoring cures and treatments which may prove effective with humans.  For instance, one drug that was almost shelved due to malformations caused in non-human animals is aspirin, one of the most relied-upon over-the-counter pain relievers used today.  Dr. Aysha Akhtar estimates that “Of every five to 10,000 potential drugs tested in the lab, only about five pass on to clinical trials. Many don’t pass the animal tests because of species-specific results. Yet many of these agents would likely have worked spectacularly and been safe in humans” ().  Clearly, the use of animals has never been, nor will be, fully representative of humankind’s biological or physical composition, and the continuation of such procedures should not be supported by a society which aims to be progressive in reputation.

This leads to the discussion of a tangible third reason why animals should not be used for experimentation: modern technology has allowed for alternative testing methods to have been created which may sufficiently erase the desire for animals to continue to be used.  There are numerous experiments which have in existence replacements which can fully eradicate the use of live animals and potentially may produce better-adjusted results than live animals currently do.  The Humane Society provides a list of such alternatives like using blood donated by human volunteers in order to test for fever-causing contaminants in medicines; artificial human skin, such as EpiDerm, which can be used for skin corrosion and irritation tests; eyes of animals already slaughtered by the meat industry in order to detect irritating chemicals; the Reduced Local Lymph Node Assay, a non-animal test for to research skin allergies; and the 3T3 Neutral Red Uptake Phototoxicity Test, a non-animal test for to research sunlight-induced phototoxicity.  Millions of animals would be spared from pain if all accepted non-invasive methods were implemented (“Alternatives to Animal Tests”).  In total, 94 alternative, non-animal experiments exist, dissipating cruelty from such fields as vaccines, dermal absorption, and eye and skin corrosion, according to The Humane Society (“Validated and Accepted Alternative Methods”).  

In conclusion, clear reasons exist as to why using animals for biomedical research is wrong.  This outdated experimental tactic violates inhumane standards through violent abuse of test subjects, which are irrefutably poor models for potential human remedies, and alternative non-animal methods are prevalent and accepted throughout the international scientific community.  The celebrated Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi is famously quoted as saying “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated” (“Animal Rights Quotes”).  Indeed, how will generations to come view our manipulation and mistreatment of other sentient beings?  The ability to suffer alone should be indicative of deserving a higher degree of moral respect.  Animals feel degrees of pleasure, love, and happiness, just like humans -- so why do we still choose to let them feel loneliness, fear, and pain?

 

Works Cited

"About Animal Testing." Questions and Answers. Humane Society International, n.d. Web. Apr. 2015.

"Alternatives to Animal Tests." The Humane Society of the United States. The Humane Society, n.d. Web. Apr. 2015.

"Animal Research and Pain." Ethics of Medical Research with Animals. N.p., n.d. Web. Apr. 2015.

"Animal Rights Quotes." Philosophy Lit. N.p., n.d. Web. Apr. 2015.

"Animal Testing Pros and Cons." ProCon.org. N.p., n.d. Web. Apr. 2015.

"Animal Use in Research." Biomedical Research. New England Anti-Vivisection Society, n.d. Web. Apr. 2015.

Croswell, Alexis. "5 Ways Animal Testing Hurts Humans." One Green Planet. One Green Planet, n.d. Web. Apr. 2015.

Garrett, Jeremy R. The Ethics of Animal Research: Exploring the Controversy. N.p.: n.p., 2012. Print.

Pippin, John J. "Animal Research in Medical Sciences." South Texas Law Review 54 (2013): n. pag. Web.

"Questions and Answers About Biomedical Research : The Humane Society of the United States." Questions and Answers. The Humane Society, n.d. Web. Apr. 2015.

"Validated and Accepted Alternative Methods." Non-animal Methods for Toxicity Testing. The Humane Society, n.d. Web. Apr. 2015.