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.

     

Now, with all the evidence at hand, do you still agree with animal testing?

To learn more about this controversial topic, you can visit the following site.

       

Mates for life

Spring is coming! Everything we can hear is "love, love, love". We can see couples in the streets, parks, and even in our campus. But are we the only ones who experiment this "special" feeling? What about the animals?

Some biologists found out that not only turtledoves stay together for a long time, as the twelve days of christmass tale told us. There are some extraordinary animals' lifestyles that have inspired our culture through time.

A clear example of this are swans. As we all have watched in movies, they are always the symbols of pure and eternal love. This is consequence of their monogamy. Swans stay with the same partner for almost all their lifetime. Even in some cases they even comite suicide when their lover dies.

Birds aren't the only one faithful specie. Wolves are always related to the concept of betray and coldness. Which it is not closed to what their family's lifestyle is about. They stay in groups called packs that consist in a male and female and their offspring. It's very similar to how families are made in our society but their relationship is even more stable than a lot of humans have.

Maybe love is not a concept well-known by the animal kind but they are able to have a faithful and long term relationship. Do you know some other examples? Would you call their bounds “love”?

(Source: http://www.divinecaroline.com/33/94736-eight-animals-mate)