Jeremy Bentham once said while talking about animals, “ The question is not can they reason, nor, can they talk, but can they suffer?” This quote is talking about animals and how they feel. They may not be physically capable of talking with you, but they do have feelings and they can suffer. Throughout the history of the world, animals have been used for biomedical research. They were bred in captivity from the beginning never even having the chance to lead a normal life. In 1975 Peter Singer published “Animal Liberation” and changed the view of how everybody looked and thought about animals because it revealed what happens in animal product testing procedures. The amount of testing on animals in the US should be decreased, even if it has …show more content…
Animals in research are treated as though they don’t have feelings. For instance, the Draize Test made in 1944 is a test to see whether or not something causes irritation when placed on animal skin or eyes. According to NAVS, National Anti-Vivisection, “ In the eye version, rabbits are placed in restraining stalks and their eyelids were held open with clips-in some cases for days at a time- to keep them from blinking away the solutions”(Do Cosmetic Companies Still Test on Live Animals? ). These tests aren’t just very uncomfortable, they cause burning, itching, and bleeding. It is obvious that animals are not treated fairly in research, almost as if the animal doesn't matter as long as the product is great. Just because they can’t talk or understand doesn’t mean animals don’t have feelings and can’t suffer. That’s not all, not only do animals suffer in these tests, but they are killed. According to PETA, “Each year, more than 100 million animals—including mice, rats, frogs, dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs, monkeys, fish, and birds—are killed in U.S. laboratories for biology lessons, medical training, curiosity-driven experimentation, and chemical, drug, food, and cosmetics testing” (Experiments On Animals : Overview). In other words, lots of animals are killed just for makeup and curiosity not even for medical research. Animals should not be killed for unnecessary testing. How do you feel knowing that the …show more content…
Animals are just too different for reliable tests to be made. Aysha Akhtar, neurologist and public health specialist wrote, “Animal experiments fail because no matter how many physiologic similarities there may be between other animals and humans, there are just too many differences. To make matters worse, we are not even aware of what most of those differences are.” This means that, lots of times when medicine or drugs work in animals they are ineffective in humans. It’s not because it was just a one time thing, but because animals are not similar enough to always work on humans. The way a human reacts to something will not be the same as how an animal reacts. The failure of medicine is not a great thing.“Most potential new drugs fail when they're tested in people. These failures are not only a major disappointment, they sharply drive up the cost of developing new drugs. A major reason for these failures is that most new drugs are first tested out in mice, rats or other animals”(Harris) This is saying that animals are not the answer to all medical problems. Lots of times when drugs are tested on animals they fail on people. When diseases are artificially given to animals it’s not the same when it occurs naturally in humans. Some animals may have the same organs as people, but humans and animals have not evolved in the same way. Animals just aren't the same as humans and that’s a