Stop Testing On Animals Essays - Animal Rights, Animal Welfare

Stop Testing on Animals By Noah Bracking March, 1999 Testing on animals started many years ago with the Greece people. It helped to improve medical technology and kept people safe. However, testing on animals has been taken too far. A healthy guinea pig or a playful dog have been put through troublesome experiences. Needles have been stuck through their eyes, poisonous medication has been shoved down their throats, their fur is shaved off, and they are fed unknown trial foods. All to get products out in the markets. I am against animal testing, because I believe that it does not work. It is only to make money from the government. In this world, animals don't have equal rights. There are too many people that believe that humans are much more superior than animals. Does Animal testing really work? Many times it does work, but only after killing several animals. There is more that meets the eye with animal testing. Companies can obtain accurate results without using animals, but they still use animals. Is it simply for entertainment? Or is it because government pays money for each tests and the testers want the money? Several things do not prove animal testing good. For example: -One hundred milligrams of scopolamine leaves dogs and cats unaffected, but five milligrams are sufficient to kill a human being. -Does your cat have the sniffles? Be sure not to give her any aspirin unless, of course, you want to kill her. -Do we want cooks to stop using parsley? Let's give it to a parrot and you will find him stone dead in the morning. -Or do we want penicillin to disappear from all drugstore counters? Let's give guinea-pigs a taste of it, and they will promptly die from it. -Are you asked to demonstrate the uselessness of vitamin C? Then remove it entirely from the diet of some animal that's close at hand ? a dog, cat, rat, mouse, hamster. They will nevertheless stay healthy, because their organisms produce their own vitamin C. But we may not withhold it from guinea-pigs, primates, or humans. Deprived of all vitamin C they would eventually all die form scurvy. These few things should show you that if animals react in such a different way from human beings, how can one test on them, medications that are intended for us? Alternatives If you think all animal testing is bad but there is no other way. You are wrong. There are many alternatives to animal testing and they work without harming a single soul. To test without animals a company has to take an item common with a human and test on that. For instance: -Eytex is done with test tubes and measures eye irritancy with a jack bean, which is like a human's eye. -We could also test with human tissue. And don't worry this will not harm the human either. -We have also tried growing human skin in a bag. This worked but was very costly. -We can also use technology called TOPKAT. These are very possible alternatives; they are just not used because of the large costs. But how can we continue to harm animals? We've made monkeys smoke hundreds of cigarettes just to test lung cancer and we have cut up animals and left them to die. Can you imagine that a dog that has been tested on several times has become very violent and could wind up in a home with a little child? We must stop testing on living animals who have been put on this earth for a reason which is certainly not for killing them. And lastly, we must learn to live and let live.