NO to Animal Testing
What is Animal Testing?
Animal testing is forcing an animal to undergo an experiment or test that cause them sufferings and lasting harm. It might also end up with killing the animal after the experiment. Animals do not benefit or have any advantages from those tests but rather they are subjected to pain.
According to Cruelty Free International’s article “About Animal Testing”
Animal experiments include:
- Injecting or force feeding animals with potentially harmful substances
- Surgically removing animals’ organs or tissues to deliberately cause damage
- Forcing animals to inhale toxic gases
- Subjecting animals to frightening situations to create anxiety and depression.
Why some experiments use animals in testing?
According to Stanford Medicine’s article “Why Animal Research?”:
– Animals are biologically very similar to humans. For example mice share more than 98% DNA with humans.
– Animals are susceptible to many of the same health problems as humans – cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc.
– With a shorter life cycle than humans, animal models can be studied throughout their whole life span and across several generations, a critical element in understanding how a disease processes and how it interacts with a whole, living biological system.
Debate around Animal Testing:
“If we didn’t use animals, we’d have to test new drugs on people.”
Truth is that we will eventually test on a human where the first person to try a specific drug (after testing on animals), will be the first one to use this drug and will undergo the test. Animal tests are so unreliable, they make those human trials all the more risky. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has noted that 95% of all drugs that are shown to be safe and effective in animal tests fail in human trials because they don’t work or are dangerous. To add, some side effects are not shown on animals but can affect humans.
What can be used to test on rather than animals?
Many ways can be used to test drugs, chemicals and vaccines without testing on animals.
- Growing cells in laboratory
Cell cultures have been central to key developments in areas such as cancers, sepsis, kidney disease and AIDS, and are used in chemical safety testing, vaccine production and drug development.
- Human tissues
Rather than animal testing, tissues donated from volunteers are more relevant way to study human biology. For example, skin and eye models made from reconstituted human skin and other tissues have been developed and are used to replace the cruel rabbit irritation tests.
- Volunteer studies
For example, brain imaging machines that can see inside the brain is used to monitor the treatment of brain disease. This can help researchers understand the causes by comparing with healthy volunteers.
Animals suffer and die from being tested on while there are many ways to experiment any biological tests without harming any living being.
WE ARE CRUELTY-FREE
