Animal testing has been frequently used to test the safety of drugs, vaccines, and more to see if it’s good for human use. It’s being put into action worldwide—maybe even right now—and the people who don’t see what it’s really doing don’t think twice about it. Animal testing does help us make new discoveries, after all.
But animal testing needs more attention. It’s badly harming animals; no matter what the procedures are classified as, mild or not, can cause animals serious physical and physiological damage. Humane Society International gives a list of things animal testing involves, including inflicted pain on the animal to study its physiology. Most of the time, the animals may be killed after an experiment, though they can also be reused in other experiments.
“I think that animal testing is bad, because scientists are using innocent animals for tests and experiments. Sure, it would help humans overcome diseases and such, but scientists are still using animals who have done nothing wrong for purposes the creatures aren’t even involved with. Imagine if you were suddenly grabbed out of your home to be tested on to help some stranger. What would you feel? Angry, furious, maybe scared,” said 7th-grader Anya He at Greenhills. “Then, think about the animals being used for experiments. In their eyes, we’re nothing but strangers that are cruelly using them for our own gain. The experiments don’t even help the animals in the first place. So obviously, if you simply thought about the feelings of the animals being tested on, animal testing is quite literally horrible.”
This brings up a very important point. How would you like to be trapped in a confined space, cut off from any social interaction, with the possibility that you would be killed any second hanging in the air? Well, at least you would know what’s going on, while animals really don’t. They don’t understand why they’re where they are, and they don’t understand what we’re doing to them. They don’t understand that they are going to soon be killed because people want to examine them for their own benefit.
“I think that animal testing is cruel and wrong,” said Julia Czyz, a 7th-grader at Greenhills. “This is because animals that are tested on are treated poorly and used for testing chemicals that if you don’t feel okay testing on yourself, should not be manufactured in the first place.”
All around the world, animals are having to suffer through unimaginable horrors: Humane Society International says a few, such as having chemicals being dropped into their eyes, being forced to breathe or ingest substances that could easily turn out to be toxic. This causes them to get burned, purposefully infected with disease, and much more.
“I think animal testing has both pros and cons. It’s very sad for the animals. Many healthy animals are deliberately sickened, have to suffer painful experiments, and most end up killed. However, animal testing has its pros as well,” said Clague 7th grader Annamaria Riccardi. “Doing these experiments help humans find cures to illnesses as well as creating medicines and vaccines. Yes, most of the time animal testing experiments fail, but would you rather have the patients be the first ones to use the product, without knowing what the results would be? If animal testing was banned, it would be dangerous for humans to discover new cures for deadly diseases.”
Pros and cons are what follow every single idea, not just animal testing. This is what makes it so hard for anyone to be completely on one side or the other. It is completely true that animal testing allows us to make important breakthroughs and inventions, but is torturing animals really the only thing we can do to achieve these results? Is it really the only way we can keep humans healthy and living? What about alternatives? Some would argue that alternatives wouldn’t be as reliable or effective, and that studying animals through animal testing will be close to studying humans. However, as NIH says, “The lack of sufficient congruence between animal models and human diseases is another significant obstacle to translational reliability.” Some alternatives, however, have proven their reliability. Some good alternatives to animal testing include using human volunteers, synthetic artificial membranes (to replace human and animal skin), scanning technologies, and computer models.
So that brings us to the question of: what can we do? Well, we can write to companies that do use animal testing. We can buy cruelty-free products. We can avoid owning stock in companies that experiment on animals, and only give to charities that do not use animal testing. There are many things we can do, many ways we can help, but before we can take any action, we must simply open our eyes.
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