Although Animal testing has proven helpfull in many consumer industries, in medicine it wastes lives.

 

I imagine that most people don’t want to see animals harmed, but if you had to choose between the life of a rat and the life of a loved one you would choose your loved one. What I would ask you to think about however is that unfortunately the decision is not that simple. The truth is that most experiments conducted on animals are not relevant to human health, nor do they contribute to medical advancements.

 

Consider also that animal testing can be detrimental to humans, not just the animals that are experimented on. 92 percent of experimental drugs that work safely in nonhuman animals fail in human clinical trials because they are deemed too dangerous or ineffective. This is because animal experiments don’t accurately predict human responses. For example, human volunteers that were in the process of testing a new monoclonal antibody in the UK suffered near fatal allergic reactions, despite the testing on monkeys at 500 times the human dose failing to predict the dangerous side effects. These results are also consistent with the globally available drug Vioxx, which was supposed to treat arthritis. Vioxx was proven to be safe by not just monkeys, but also by five other animal species, but despite this Vioxx was estimated to have caused around 320,000 heart attacks and 140,000 total deaths worldwide.

 

Animal testing is an unrequired step in the pursuit of medical advancements. Regarding the fight against Cancer, animal experimentation has yielded minimal results. The former head of the National Cancer Institute, Richard Klausner, highlighted this when he said, “The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse”. He then followed this up by stating “We have cured mice of cancer for decades and it simply didn’t work in humans.” This is concordant with a survey of 4,451 Cancer drugs that found over 93 percent failed after only entering the very first stage of human clinical trials. This statement proves the futility of animal testing in cancer research, yet despite this, the experimentation continues. This is worsened by Epidemiological and clinical studies determining that most cancers are caused by human-derived lifestyle choices. This highlights that we can beat cancer by taking human-relevant data into account, and by making healthier lifestyle choices.

So, I hope you see now that these decisions really are not as simple as choosing human life over a rat’s life. Mice and rats are complex, unique, social individuals with the capacity to experience and display a wide range of emotions. Immeasurable animal suffering is not helping the human condition in a valuable way. In fact, we are wasting valuable resources on animal experiments that should be spent on better-designed cancer treatment trials.

 

So, in conclusion, it is clear that animal testing is bad science and it wastes lives.