An Opinion On Animal Testing

Jenn Searls
Block D

Animal Testing

Animal testing is the act of using innocent animals for scientific experimentation, usually to ensure whether a product is safe for humans or not.  Each year in the United States about 70 million animals are injured or killed in effect of animal testing.  Animals have as much a right to life as humans do. Why should we be able to force animals into risking their lives for our benefit?
Animals react differently than humans to different drugs, vaccines, and experiments. Ignoring this difference is very costly to human health.  An example of the dangers of animal testing is the Thalidomide tragedy of the 1960s and 1970s. Thalidomide had been safety tested on thousands of animals. It was marketed as a sedative for pregnant or breast feeding mothers and it supposedly caused no harm to either mother or child. Despite this "safety testing" at least 10,000 children whose mothers had taken Thalidomide were born throughout the world with severe deformities.
If this tragedy isn’t enough to let people realize the consequences of animal testing, then I don’t know what is.  There are so many people out there who are against animal testing.  I’m sure we could easily find volunteering people to allow testing to be done on them, or even people willing to do it for some cash.

"Because of the irreconcilable biological differences between animals and human beings, the results of animal tests cannot be applied to human beings with any degree of confidence. Dr. Ralph Heywood, past scientific director of Huntington Research Centre (U.K.), stated at a 1989 scientific workshop held at the Ciba Foundation that: ‘…the best guess for the correlation of adverse reactions in man and animal toxicity data is somewhere between 5% and 25%.’ "
-Dr. Andre Menache, speaking at the 10th World Congress on Law and Medicine, held in Jerusalem, Israel, August 29, 1994.