Unethical Animal Testing

Although the subject of animal testing has long been a controversial topic due to its harmful nature over sentient beings, it has been proven many times to be a “necessary evil” in the biomedical industry. As animal testing is performed in many fields for varying purposes, the legitimacy of purpose for inflicting pain on animals and the ethics of the industry is often in question. The practice of animal testing in the biomedical and pharmaceutical fields however, has long been a common practice in developing and improving biotechnology and has had much to show for it in the form of new drugs and new life saving procedures. Furthermore, the safety testing of drugs on animals before marketing (required by the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act) has evidently proved to be a necessary step in preventing tragic incidents such as the “1937 ‘Elixir Sulfanilamide’” incident and the thalidomide accident from the late 1950’s to early 1960’s. These incidents exemplified that the wellbeing of humans were being marginalized when their products were not tested before being marketed. Animal testing stands to serve a greater good by bringing irreplaceable progress in technological advancements that provide vitality and longevity to human life. Though people’s viewpoints on the ethics of animal testing differ immensely, animal testing and experimentation come with a plethora of ethical questions, and that it has been a topic of concern for many animal activist groups in recent years. It is generally agreed upon, as seen in the Eurobarometer survey in 2010 mentioned in Masterton’s (2014) study, that the legitimacy of the purpose of the testing is a factor in whether people are in support of animal experimentation. For example, the excerpt from Masterton’s (2014) study states: “In the past 100 years, legal and attitudinal changes have increasingly given more protection to animal welfare and excluded previously legitimate purposes, such as animal fights for human entertainment (HMSO, 1911). In an opinion survey, including both researchers and members of the general public, the least supported use of animals was for personal decoration followed by entertainment, but the use of animals in medical research received relatively strong support (Knight et al, 2004, 2009). Today, medical research is one of the few purposes of sufficient value to warrant inflicting pain, distress or lethal outcomes on animals.” There are many purposes where inflicting harm on sentient beings cannot be condoned, such as for household products, entertainment, for decoration, and for majority of cosmetics because it is wrong to harm sentient beings when it is unnecessary and for materialistic needs. …show more content…
This is partially the reason that the ethical principal of three R’s have been introduced. The three R’s stand to reduce the discomfort of animals by refining, reducing, and replacing animal testing where possible and answers to the question abusing the practice of animal testing where it is not necessary. When faced with a trade off for a necessity such as medical care, however, I believe that animal testing is condonable, and the excerpt above comes to show that majority of the general public is willing to marginalize animal welfare when faced with advancements in medical technology. Animal testing has brought very significant advancements to medical technology. As mentioned by understandinganimalresearch.org, a UK online source, it is important to note that “Animal research has played a vital part in nearly every medical breakthrough over the last decade” and “nearly every Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine since 1901 has relied on animal data for their research” (About us. (n.d.).). Although there were countless breakthroughs, some of the most notable include modern anaesthetics, penicillin, insulin, and the development of asthma inhalers, as well as vaccines for tetanus, polio, TB, Meningitis, HPV, and smallpox. “Scanning techniques including CT and MRI were [also] developed using non-human animals.”(About us. (n.d.).) All of these advancements are technologies that have made themselves a standard in modern medicine and have contributed to globally reducing death tolls. To add to these contributions, surgical procedures such as hip replacement surgery, kidney transplants, heart transplants and blood transfusions were all perfected in animals prior to trials in humans. The concept of animal testing seems to have developed a very grave connotation through modern media and animal welfare groups, yet, statistics