Imagine a syringe being forcefully shoved in your leg, injecting a possibly harmful chemical into your body. Or what about being strapped down and having to inhale sickening vapors with seemingly no end. This is the blunt reality of animal testing.
Since 1966, the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) has been supposed to protect these animals by enforcing regulations on companies that do tests on animals. They have amended their rules many times to try and keep them up to date. But despite this, 95% of animals that are most commonly tested on are not protected by AWA. Those animals are left vulnerable to cruel testing because AWA’s restrictions do not cover testing for food development or agricultural reasons.
Even animals protected by AWA are mistreated. At the federally funded New Iberia Research Center (NIRC) in Louisiana, they would intentionally put chimpanzees under psychological stress. Some of the infants would wake up during painful experiments and others would be shot at with dart guns. This ended in some chimpanzees engaging in self mutilation.
There are other cases from different research centers of animals being subjected to force feeding, malnutrition, and being wounded. In addition to that treatment, they are also killed in cruel ways such as carbon dioxide asphyxiation, neck breaking, and decapitation.
Although the NICR contributed to the success of the Covid-19 vaccine, the torture they put those defenseless chimpanzees through can not make up for it. If monkeys are 99% genetically identical to humans, why would another human want to put them through that? Animal testing is just extremely unethical and inhumane. There is no practical reason that animals should be put through this.
Animal experiments are too flawed to rely on. The 1% genetic difference between us and monkeys causes 94% failure in human trials. Many tests make it past the animal phase, but do not go further than that. Relying on that small chance for the human trial to pass is not worth all those animals’ lives lost.
Others argue that animal testing is a necessity when it comes to medicinal practice, but the fact is that there are now alternatives to animal experimentation. As our technology has improved, there have been researchers to find replacements for this predicament. Scientists have found that they can achieve the same results with vitro testing. Vitro testing involves human cells or tissue in a petri dish. Human skin can also be duplicated and produce more beneficial results than animal tests could. Eliminating animal experimentation would not harm the medicinal world. Scientists can instead test on human volunteers. Testing on animals delays the whole process anyways.
The cold truth is that there are other viable alternatives to animal testing people choose to ignore. Arguments for animal experiments can easily be bashed and disproved by other scientists with credible research. Animal testing should be replaced with the other substitutes made by other researchers.
