English B1A
March 22, 2012
Animal Experimentation Experimentation done on animals is considered unethical, for some people at least. Not only do animals suffer while being experimented on, they often at times undergo vivisection. Vivisection, in the strictest sense, is the partial or complete dissection of live animals for research purposes (Monamy 6). If humans consider it wrong to inflict pain unnecessarily to other humans, then it should also be unnecessary to inflict pain onto animals. Animals breathe, eat, drink, excreta, reproduce, and can feel pain just as humans can. All animals (including human beings) must be treated identically, for each species has capacities and needs that are peculiar to it and deserve to be taken into account (Fox 64). Animals have sentient just as humans do. A sentient animal not only has an awareness of its surroundings but is capable of experiencing pain (Monamy 6). A quantum extension of ethics was proposed when Peter Singer asserted in Animal Liberation (1975) that moral consideration must transcend the species boundary to include all sentient animals (Monamy 40). Because animals experience pain just as humans do, a law should be passed where experiments on animals should be interdicted. While it has been proven that experiments on animals has benefited humans in many ways, enough evidence should have been gathered from those experiments where animals are no longer needed. Cats, dogs, sheep, lambs, pigs, mice, and monkeys are just a few of the animals that are being used in laboratories. Experimenting on dogs has found enzymes that dissolve clots in arteries. While experimenting on monkeys and chimpanzees, researchers found a way to immunize children without using painful needles, therefore saving thousands of lives and sparring even more children from having paralyzed limbs for life. Burned victims survived, “because the skin of pigs was used as a temporary graft to cover the raw, oozing areas of their seared flesh” (White 21). The hemorrhagic shock research done on dogs, “cost the life of many dogs that were bled into a state of severe and at times, fatal shock” (White 21). White also goes on to state, “Those who oppose the use of pound animals in biomedical studies make little or no mention of the fact that only two percent of those animals are used in scientific experiments, while the other ten to fifteen million meet a meaningless and useless death at the pound each year” (22). Even though this may be very true, animals should not have to suffer pain, they should not have to undergo vivisection. Cutting an animal in two while that animal is still living and breathing is cruel and inhumane. There are people who believe that animals feel no pain. In fact some people believe in Speciesism, which is the devaluing of animals simply because they are not human (Baird, Rosenbaum 8). Speciesism is just as prejudiced as racism. Seventeenth century Descartes believed that animals were machines. He believed animals could not hear, smell, see, and they felt no pain. He likened them to trees, with the exception of locomotion. Rollin states that, “animals, especially laboratory animals, suffer more severely than humans, since they have no grasp of the cause of their pain and they have no ability to anticipate the cessation of pain experiences outside their normal experience” (144). Professor Kitchell, one of the co-editors of the aforementioned pain symposium volume, believes that pain is divided into a sensory-discriminative dimension and a motivational- affective dimension. The former is concerned with locating and understanding the source of pain, its intensity, and the danger with which it is correlated; the latter with escaping from the painful stimulus (Rollin 144).
Since animals cannot deal with pain the same way as humans do, then according to Kitchell’s approach, they most likely suffer through more pain than humans. Some laboratories use what is called succinylcholine chloride, which is, “a curare-like drug that paralyzes all muscles by blocking neuro-transmission across the neuro-muscular junction, but has no anesthetic or analgesic properties” (Rollin 146). When this was experimented on humans, it is said that they are paralyzed but still have the fear of panic and the sense to know what is going on around them. The humans stated that when completely paralyzed, one cannot even cry out in pain. When laboratories use this injection on animals before cutting them open, the animal makes no sound because they simply cannot do so, researchers take this as the animal is experiencing no pain. Even though succinylcholine only paralyzes the muscles and does not hinder from experiencing pain, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), “has used succinylcholine to ‘euthanize’ thousands of pigs afflicted with cholera” (Rollin 147).