Animal testing must be stopped ASAP

For more than two millenniums, animals have been used during scientific experiments, which some of them include drug testing, behavioral studies or genetic and biomedical research.

Animal research (how this practice is called) supporters state that every medical accomplishment in the last two centuries has include the use of in vivo testing during their procedures. On the other hand, animal rights and welfare organizations, like PETA, describe animal testing as cruel, and obsolete; a poor scientific practice which is not enough regulated, and that doesn’t consider the animal’s intrinsic rights of not being used for experimentation. Nonetheless, the stress and boredom that affect animals while they are locked, most of the times cause them neurotic behaviors like spinning constantly in circles or biting themselves, after several years which only options are being drugged or just wait for it to happen, almost all of the animals used in experimentation finish their life being killed.

More than 100 million animals per year suffer and die as a result of these methods, and that number is not even close to the total quantity of beings killed inside a scientific facility, because mice, rats, birds and cold blooded animals (more than 95% of animals used in testing) are not considered on the Animal Welfare Act – the only federal American law that regulates the treatment of animals during experimentation. It was signed almost 50 years ago in 1966.

I think that little things like stopping dissections on a biology class or begin seeing and treating animals as friends and partners rather than objects or tools, could be a good start for a new scenario where “our little brothers” receive the respect they deserve.