Reasons Why Animal Testing Should Be Banned

Written by: Joyce Huang

Edited by: Kalyan Archakam, Mukhil Thavathiru Murugan, and Anthony Chen

What Is Animal Testing?

Animal testing refers to the performance of scientific procedures on living animals for research on basic biology or diseases, testing the effectiveness of new medicines, and testing human and environmental health and safety when using different types of products (cosmetics, household cleaners, food additives). Standard animal procedures include exposure to drugs, chemicals, or disease that can cause illness and pain, physical restraint for long or short periods of time, forced chemical exposure, which can include injections in the skin or forced inhalation, infliction of pain to study the recovery, and behavioral experiments designed to cause distress (such as forced swimming).

What Kinds of Animals Are Used?

The most common animals used in such procedures and experiments are mice, fish, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, rats, birds, cats, dogs, mini-pigs, and non-human primates (monkeys or chimpanzees).

How Do These Procedures Affect Animals?

These procedures, even “mild” ones, often cause animals to experience a great deal of suffering. Every year, about 115 million animals are tested worldwide, and many of them are killed by the end of the experiments. If the animal remains alive, it may be reused in later experiments.

Why Should Animal Testing Be Banned?

Animal testing should be banned because it inflicts physical and psychological distress on a large number of animals and kills many of them. Animals have feelings as humans do, and putting them in tests that cause them to suffer violates their rights of respectful treatment.

Animal testing brings up a lot of ethical issues, and it also does not produce results worth the effort put into the tests. To be specific, they are restrictive in the number of substances that can be tested, do not provide adequate information about how chemicals behave in the body, and most of the time do not correctly predict the effect or reaction of the substances on humans. Humane Society International states that “nine out of every ten candidate medicines that appear safe and effective in animal studies fail when given to humans.” Simply put, these tests are not worth much benefit to humans. For this reason, the trouble of completing these tests does not provide sufficiently effective results to make the tests worth it.

Lastly, Animal Testing should be banned because if many of the tests completed are irrelevant and ineffective, it results in drug failures when the products are later used. Animal Testing will not only be a waste of resources but ultimately a delay in medical progress.

Works Cited:

1. “About Animal Testing.” Humane Society International, 27 May 2020, https://www.hsi.org/news-media/about/.

2. Save the Animals: Stop Animal Testing |, https://www.lonestar.edu/stopanimaltesting.htm.