A young rabbit is nuzzled in a warm nest with his family, comfortable and serene when all of a sudden he is ripped from his mother’s loving side. He is placed in a white, sterile, cold laboratory in a tiny cage where he is then injected with many needles. He is so very confused, the world lacks empathy everywhere he looks. He will soon be riddled with tumors and diseases, dying a painful and unnecessary death, as do many scared small creatures that have been forced to participate in human studies. Animal experimentation is a large part of the pharmaceutical processing of drugs, to make sure that they are safe for the humans to which they are selling. Animal testing is detrimental to the subject and should be abolished because of its questionable ethics.
Animals are often subjected to incredible pain and eventually death because of these experiments. Many animal experiments are to better improve certain drugs, so the animal will need to have the health condition that the drugs are intended to fix. In this case, they will infect a group of animals with a certain disease to see how the drugs will react with said disease, and tweak it as needed. Some labs will even destroy cancer-fighting cells so that the animal will be more likely to grow tumors or have other related health issues. This would be incredibly painful and confusing for the otherwise healthy animal, for their body is attacking itself and breaking down. Even if these cancers don’t murder them, it is likely the people running the experiment will, because the animal will either be too traumatized to live a happy life, or they are too sick because of the diseases that were forced into their bodies.
The animals that the pharmaceutical companies choose for their experiments have no way to give their consent to humans. At the very most, these animals have the IQ of a young child, who also cannot give consent because they are not able to fully comprehend what is being asked of them. Even if animals did have the IQ of an adult, they are not able to communicate with humans, therefore they would never be able to choose to be in these experiments. Animals also have a much stronger survival instinct than we do, so they only think about how a situation would benefit them. Animals would never think of these torturous observations as ‘the greater good’, they would only see the danger and the pain, unlike most humans. There are many minor protection laws, as well as animal abuse laws, so why aren’t there laws against the practice of animal experimentation? Such practices are just as bad as a young human child being injected with who knows what, simply for the sake of ‘science’ or curiosity.
While some may argue that animal testing is necessary for human safety, they fail to realize that the animals that pharmaceutical companies test on have only 75-90% of the same DNA makeup as humans do, which is unreliable at best. For comparison, the most similar DNA makeup to a human is the Chimpanzee, which is 97% compatible, so the fact that other animals that are so much different are still being tested on is shocking, to say the least. Even most humans have different reactions to treatments and drugs, so using such an incompatible sample of DNA as a whole, is going to give a vastly wide range of results, which logically doesn’t make any sense for such smart scientists. These said scientists that conduct such trials can hide behind a mask of anonymity, as well as the fact they have a higher education than the general population, leaving no public awareness nor accountability for their actions.
Companies need to stop using animal testing for human products because it is ethically questionable. Animals have no way to give consent to the experiments, they are pointlessly suffering, and the experiments don’t necessarily contribute to how humans might react. Therefore, the practice of animal testing is irresponsible, if not outright insane. Most children were taught from a young age not to do something to others that they would never want to be done to them. So the question stands in this case, if a product is too unsafe to use on humans, why should an animal be forced to use it when there is no way for them to fight back or even give their opinion on the matter?