Animal research: the cruellest side of scientific progress
Vivisection is a common scientific practice that consists of doing testing on living animals so that it could be possible for researchers to get a better understanding of how human diseases works and consequently to find a cure for them.
According to official statistics, more than 50 millions of sentient beings (cats, dogs, birds, pigs, and monkeys) are used annually for laboratory investigation just in the United States.
In this sense, if we had to choose a single word to define the process of animal experimentation, it would be cruelty since inside the research facilities animal are deprived from all their rights: they are taken away from their natural environment, then they are shut in small cages, and finally they are turned into the subject of pharmaceutical research, which means that they must undergo painful surgeries and even the supply of toxic substances. At the end, after having finished the experimentation period, most of them are euthanized, or as a result of all that manipulation, they end up dying. But is all this really essential for the development of new medical treatments as scientists have claimed for years?
To animal right supporters, it is not since they deny this kind of investigations could provide reliable results due to the enormous differences between animals and humans organisms and they way they react to the same drugs. A backup for this argument could be the cases of
Clioquinol and Thalidomide; two medicines that seemed to have had positive effects on thousands of animals, but in humans they did not worked well. Indeed, Both failures caused lots of deaths in Germany and Japan respectively.
To sum up, I think it is high time that authorities stopped investing our resources in such macabre activities, and we got informed about the cost of progress since, in a way, we are responsible for the abuse if we do not show our disapproval against this.
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ReplyDeleteI think that animal experimentation will be an eternal issue just like the eternal rivalry between Capitalism and Communism. There is no other way to experiment new medical and technological advancements: research on dead and living tissues is proved to be ineffectual in most of the cases, and human experimentation is the last resource for many experiments. Finally, considering the living conditions of animals inside a laboratory in comparison to that of those living in cages and ready to be killed for food, one could say that the former are more fortunate than the latter.
DeleteI totally agree with you, Joaquin, that animal experimentation is an endless debate; however, I think that there is no difference between the suffering of laboratory animals and those who are in slaughterhouses since in both places animals are treated as non-living objects.
DeleteI completely agree with Joaquín, this will be always an eternal issue. I have heard a lot of time a reason in pro of this, that people's health is above animals, our health is even more important that animals. Would it be an excuse for this practice? I don't think so; there is no excuse for cruelty, for suffering. With all the evidence available it is difficult to avoid the sad but inevitable conclusion that animal experiments are used because they are financially expedient. Because animals are not just relatively cheap to use but there are also clear commercial advantages for the world’s most successful and ruthless industry. I’ve always thought that drug companies depend on the fact that animal experiments are unreliable in order to get their new products onto the market without testing them properly. The very unreliability and unpredictably of animal experiments makes them valuable. So Drug companies test on animals therefore that they can say that they have tested their drugs before marketing them.
ReplyDeleteNatalyn, your argument about why drug companies support animal testing is really coherent; I have never heard about it before, but it sounds logic.
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