Many of Descartes peers who were also contemporaries disagreed with this ethical standpoint on how to treat animals. John Locke, an English physician, philosopher, and contemporary, openly disagreed and stated that humans should not conduct these painful biomedical experiments on animals, and that animals contain some human-like characteristics and are capable of feeling pain. Locke believed that conducting these harmful experiments and mistreating animals could potentially lead to a path of also harming humans. Immanuel Kant, another important contemporary, also expressed his views against pointless harmful experiments against animals. He stated that animals were indeed conscious beings which could feel pain and it would be unethical and …show more content…
In this era, medical knowledge progressed faster than it ever had before. Medicine shifted more towards more accurate diagnoses and understanding diseases much better in order to be able to heal patients properly. This meant that laboratory usage and experimentation became much more prevalent. Medical research and science flourished in this era. Although animal testing was still not regulated in the first half of the 19th century, opposition to vivisections grew throughout Europe and expanded even further in the second half of the 19th century. Previous to this era, the antivivisection argument was that vivisections did not provide useful medical knowledge, but this argument quickly shifted to preventing unnecessary suffering to animal subjects. Near the end of the 19th century, people began realizing that there was some validity to both sides of this argument; although animals suffered, some scientific advancement was coming out of it. Instead of choosing a side on the debate, scientists and legislators proposed bills which would regulate animal experimentation rather than to cut it out entirely or to make it an unrestricted field to let scientists do whatever they want. These bills still allowed scientists to conduct experiments to get the optimum results, but required them to take preemptive measure to ensure the least …show more content…
Many life-saving discoveries for both humans and animals have been made such as vaccination, blood transfusions, chemotherapy, and more advanced surgical techniques just to name a few. Much of the reason that legislation for the ethics of animal use in biomedical experiments changed in this era was because of the use of rodents such as rat and mice in experiments (Rudacille, D, 2001). Previously, scientists had used animals such as dogs and horses which the general population was much more sympathetic towards, however, rats and mice were seen as detestable, therefore scientists found it easier to test on these animals without backlash. On top of this, rodents had a much shorter lifespan and reproduced very quickly, so they quickly became the “perfect” test subject (Baumans, V. 2007). Rats have played an extremely significant role in biomedical experiments and the advancement of medicine and will continue to play an integral role in experiments in the foreseeable