Animal testing should be banned

By 10518 Seo-Won Lee

Recently, with the rising amount of new technology and science development, new products and items have been released to make our lives easier. These products or items help us in different ways but are all seen to be effective in some way. However, these developments all come at a cost, one of them being animal testing, which is the largest problem out of them all.

The term “animal testing” is defined as procedures performed on living animals for purposes of research into assessing the effectiveness of new products, and testing the human health and/or environmental safety of consumer and industry products such as cosmetics, household cleaners, food additives, pharmaceuticals and chemicals. All procedures, even those classified as “mild,” have the potential to cause the animals physical as well as psychological distress and suffering. Often the procedures can cause a great deal of suffering. Most animals are killed at the end of an experiment, but some may be reused in subsequent experiments. Most of the animal testing cases are related to testing new substances to animals, therefore having the possibility to harm or damage the animal in some way or another. I believe that animal testing should be abolished because of the ethical problems of animal testing, the effect it has on the animals and also the effectiveness of it.

To begin, Animal testing has alot of problems regarding ethical and moral perspectives, each clearly showing that animal testing is rather inhumane or an incorrect way to test a product.

To start off, animal testing is a process in which is not authorized by the animal. However, people force these tests on animals and even without their consent, people make these animals feel pain, both psychological and physical. Also, Even if these animals recover or survive from the tests, they are usually reused for another test or is impaired in some type of way due to the testing. There is also evidence from peta ( People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) stating that around 75% of animals that go though animal testing have expreienced some type of pain and that around 80% of the surviving animals will be reused , therefore feeling more pain and also 27% of the animals will be impaired in some type of way after testing. This clearly shows hat animal testing is a inhumane and also a unethical way of testing new products.

In addittion, the effect of animal testing towards animals is also seen as a large problem. As stated before, 27% of the animals will be impaired in some type of way after testing. This shows that even after surviving the animal testing phase, animals will still be unable to function properly, causing them to experience difficulty in normal life and also could cause psychological ot physical pain. Since animals are usually adaptive to the wilderness, they are encouraged to roam freely and follow their instincts. However, animal testing is usually held in a captive area and there are hardly any cases where animals had access to freedom of movement or to follow their instincts. Rather, they are all held in cages which barely fit their size and they are uncomfortably stuck in a place where they can't even socialize with other animals. Also, food and water, e.t.c. is provided to these animals, which overrides their instincts and also makes the animal more adapted to the environment (captivity). This leads to a lot of animals unable to rehabilitate to their new environment when they are released, and are usually captured by predators or experience difficulty in finding food or making their home. Basically making animal’s survival rates even lower even if they survived the previous testing.

Moreover, the effective of animal testing itself has a few problems as well. Even with a fully completed animal testing procedures, These products could cause several problems to only humans, since humans and animal’s biological nature and features are different. Also, animals could be able to survive things that humans can't and also die from substances that humans are not susceptible to. This ultimately lowers the efficiency of animal testing and the likelyness of it actually being a truthful and reliable trial. There has been several reports from the U.S. drug and medicine related health departments stating that around 23% of animal testing cases proved to have no correlation to the substances and that 19% of it has been seen as an ineffective case. This leads to more than the required amount of animal lives wasted towards an ineffective objective, making it even more difficult for both humans and animals.

In the end, the ethical problems, effectiveness and the effect of animal testing could cause more than the needed amount of pain and lives related to our wellbeing or the safety of products and substances. And with the amount of animal testing currently happening, It is visioned to cause more than just harm to animals in the future. With the abolishment of animal testing we could make sure that the animals live fulfilling lives, and that animals could stay healthy and happy. This is why we should abolish animal testing once and for all.