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Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.
George Bernard Shaw

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Why Animal Testing is Unethical

Prose

Essay

The small, shivering cat huddles against the corner of her tiny cage, trying to sleep but kept awake by the ever-present pain in her head and body. She has been awake for 43 hours now, undergoing experimental research. The electrode tests, research on the effects of electrical impulses upon brain waves, require electrodes to be strapped to her head and electrical shocks delivered straight to her brain. Sleep-deprived and dazed with pain, she is barely conscious. She tries to moan with pain, but her vocal cords have been cut so that her screams do not disturb the scientists. All she can do is shake with fear and pain and hope it all ends soon. Fortunately for her, it will—tomorrow the scientists are going to decapitate her and remove her brain to study the effects of their experiment.

I’d like to tell you that this is a made-up story, but it’s not. It’s a real scientific experiment, and it’s happening right now as we speak. Worldwide, 100 to 300 million animals die each year in laboratory experiments, experiments whose methods are unnecessarily cruel and whose results are often inconclusive. Animal experimentation is unethical and impractical, and I will present the case against it.

A Brief History of Animal Testing

Animal testing has been practiced since ancient times, when the ancient Greeks killed and dissected animals for scientific and religious purposes. Vivisection continued throughout ancient times and into the Christian era, becoming a replacement for human dissection when autopsies were banned by the Catholic Church. Animals were treated as insensitive objects, mere automatons incapable of pain or emotion. An 18th-century observer, describing the treatment of dogs undergoing vivisection, tells us of the scientists’ views towards animals:

[The anatomists] administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that had been touched, but the whole body was without feeling. They nailed poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them and see the circulation of the blood…

By the 1800s, science and medicine were moving forward at unprecedented rates. Germs were discovered and vaccines invented; pills were created and diseases eradicated. Animals were involved in many research ventures, ranging from simple dissections to Pavlov’s classical conditioning experiment. With the advent of the factory line, animal testing became an impersonal study on large groups of animals, from rats to dogs to chimpanzees. The twentieth century brought more medicines and scientific breakthroughs. Psychological studies were conducted on monkeys and cats; chimps and dogs were sent into space. Human life was extended and improved—and still animals were treated as objects, used as tools for humanity’s benefit. The life and fate of the laboratory animal has improved little since the 18th century. We have spent hundreds of years improving the lives of our own species; it is time we turned our attention to improving the lives of others.

The Case Against Animal Testing

As the section above shows, we have come a long way in science and medicine. Unfortunately, we still cling to the useless and outdated use of animal research subjects. Here is the case against animal experimentation.

1. The Similarity Principle

We conduct medical tests upon mammals because they are more like us than birds, fish, insects or amphibians. We conduct psychological testing upon monkeys and chimpanzees because they are mentally like us. Chimps are valued medical subjects because they are so genetically close to humans. Yet, if these animals really are like us, we cannot in good conscience test upon them. I call this the similarity principle: if they are so like us that we can test on them, then they are so like us that we are morally obligated not to test on them. Either animals are so dissimilar to us that we cannot logically apply the results of animal tests to humans, or they are so similar that it is unethical to test upon them.

2. Deliberate Ignorance of Scientific Information

It it truly astounding that scientists and philosophers still debate over the issue of animal sentience. Surely science has already proved that animals think, experience emotion, and feel pain. We are centuries beyond the Descartian no-status theory. We have seen orphaned baby rhesus monkeys lavish affection upon cardboard surrogate mothers and watched chimps and gorillas communicate through sign language. We have taught rats to navigate ever-changing mazes and trained parrots to work simple computers. And we have all heard animals scream in pain when injured. To argue against animal sentience is ridiculous.

Even if the scientific proof of animal sentience did not sway us from animal experimentation, the inaccuracy of animal testing should. Animal experimentation is impractical and inconclusive; it tells us little about human bodies and health. Just because a drug works on a rat does not mean it will work on a human; just because a virus kills a mouse does not mean it will kill a human. Lab animals are bred for predisposition to certain diseases, kept in unnatural conditions and exposed to disproportionately large amounts of chemicals or other test substances. We hear that a certain chemical causes blindness in rabbits; we find out later that the chemical has no effect upon humans. We are told that an experimental cancer drug tested on rats had no effect and will be discarded; years later we discover that it does work on humans after all. We are daily subjected to dangers and deprived of useful information, all because of animal experimentation. And, after all the animal tests are done, human clinical trials are still required before the research can be solidly applied to humans. Using animals as research subjects is therefore a waste of time.

3. The Convenience Factor

Although we now know that animal testing is scientifically pointless and ethically wrong, we continue to conduct tests upon animals. Why? For our own convenience. We can do things to animals that we could not ethically do to a human being. Would Harlow and Zimmerman, the men who conducted the sadistic psychological tests upon baby rhesus monkeys, ever get away with conducting the same test upon human infants? Of course not. We know that if we look at the issue too closely, we must inevitably condemn animal testing, and so we turn a blind eye to the ethics of this scientific crime.

The convenience factor does not apply merely to animals. In the early 1930s, the U.S. government began a 40-year study of tertiary syphilis known as the Tuskegee Experiment. The subjects were 399 poor black men, all infected with syphilis, none of whom had been told of their condition or of the study they were unwittingly participating in. These men were given no treatment and allowed to deteriorate and die, suffering the horrible ravages of the disease and infecting many of their wives and children, merely so that the government could observe the disease in progress.

Also in the 1930s, the Nazis and the Japanese Army performed tests upon concentration camp prisoners, subjecting them to painful and often fatal experiments. Prisoners were exposed to extreme temperatures, subjected to physical and mental stress tests, injected with chemicals and dissected alive. The people conducting these tests thought of the human subjects as animals, without sentience or intelligence. Today we condemn such experiments as horrendous and unethical. If we apply these labels to the experiments performed on on humans, we must apply them to the experiments performed on animals as well, for we are also ignoring the feelings and rights of the animals we test on. Like the Nazis, we are using animals for our own convenience, performing experiments we would never dare to perform on other humans. Why would we not experiment upon humans? Because we are “better” and “more intelligent” than animals. We are “the master race.” And by labeling ourselves thus, we make ourselves no better than the Nazis.

4. Pointless Suffering

Many of the tests researchers inflict upon animals are painful and lower the animals’ quality of life. Scientists inject animals with irritating chemicals, genetically manipulate them to cause rare and painful genetic diseases, give them cancer and other diseases, and cause other injuries in the name of science. These animals are not given painkillers and are forced to endure prolonged agony before eventually dying or being killed. Sentience and intelligence aside, it is ethically wrong to inflict such pointless suffering upon any living creature. Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, argues that, whether or not animals are as valuable or more valuable than humans, it is wrong to inflict suffering. Indeed, when we have so many alternatives to animal testing and so many ways to relieve animal suffering, it is deliberately cruel to torture them thus.

5. The Many Alternatives

Some insist that, while it may be cruel to test on animals, it is a necessity; we have no alternatives to animal testing. These people are wrong. There are many alternatives to animal experimentation, and scientists are creating more and more options every day. These options include lab-grown cells and organs, improved test methods, and human clinical tests. Lab-grown cells and organs are already being used for cosmetic testing; as scientists develop more and better organs, animal testing will become pointless and obsolete. Test methods have also improved; for example, pregnancy tests used to require a time-consuming trip to the doctor’s office and a test involving the killing of a rabbit or frog. Now all that is involved is an over-the-counter kit which provides a chemical analysis of the patient’s urine. And there is also the option of human clinical tests, which are done on volunteers. This research method has the added benefit of greater accuracy, since the results come directly from human beings.

Conclusion

While science and medicine are indeed worthy causes deserving of research, they do not justify needless cruelty and wholesale slaughter. We have progressed, scientifically and ethically, beyond the need for animal test subjects. To continue using animals as test subjects is both impractical and immoral, and animal experimentation should be stopped as soon as possible.

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A Note on This Essay

This essay was written by a student, and is not to be regarded as an authoritative scholarly article. Please do not cite it in your school paper or encourage your students to do so.

See Also

• Animal Rights FAQs