Are animal tests necessary? How do we choose between scientific advancement and moral responsibility?

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the validity of animal testing. The ethical issues of animal testing and the development of alternative methods make it necessary to discuss the necessity of animal testing.

 

In the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes, we see how advanced genetic engineering is used to increase the intelligence of apes and train them to become space explorers and explore the universe on behalf of humans. One day, the ape went missing during one of these expeditions. Worried, the owner ignored his commander’s orders and took off alone in a pod, unexpectedly landing on a planet called “Ashlar” thousands of years in the future. He was horrified to discover that humans were ruled by apes on that planet. Unlike on Earth, the apes were able to communicate and had similar intelligence to humans, but they also treated humans like slaves and acted as masters.
After watching this movie, I realized something. The movie looks at humans from an animal’s point of view and reflects the fact that humans have been overly exploiting animals that cannot speak and cannot fight back. If you think deeply about the message that the director wants to convey, it might be that we should open our minds and re-examine how we have treated animals. Humans have never thought about the plight of animals under their control, but through this movie, we are forced to face the fact that we have become slaves or toys like animals. We selfishly treat animals unfairly in order to develop the science that has made our daily lives easier. It’s time for us to sincerely consider the rights and feelings of animals, something we’ve never paid attention to before.
To answer these questions faithfully, we need a lot of complex scientific and philosophical knowledge and experience, but here we will focus on the mental life of animals and what kind of beings they are. Animals are creatures that have sensory and perceptual capacities. Sensory capacities are the ability to feel, and perceptual capacities are the ability to organize and interpret sensory stimuli to give meaning to the environment. Animals feel emotions such as distress, anxiety, worry, pain, and joy. However, animals lack the perceptual or consciousness capabilities of humans. Some philosophers have argued that since “language” is essential to sentience, animals without language must lack sentience. It’s common knowledge that even the most intelligent dolphins can’t write a book, and even the smartest chimpanzees can’t build an airplane and fly around the planet. There is no denying that humans are the most superior animals on the planet.
The cruelty of humans to animals for scientific gain can be seen in animal testing. Although animals have been sacrificed for human use for a long time, the issue of laboratory animals has only been raised seriously in the last 100 years or so, alongside our remarkable scientific advancements. The term animal testing is widely used interchangeably with the term animal-use research. Animal testing is scientific experimentation that uses laboratory animals for research, observation, experimentation, and education. This form of experimentation falls into two categories: research that seeks new knowledge about biological processes and functions, and experiments that explore new medical, veterinary, or biological knowledge to promote human, animal, or environmental health. Estimates suggest that 274,000 animals are killed in animal testing worldwide every day, or three animals every second. And that’s just the vertebrates. These staggering numbers show us the cruelty of humans sacrificing animals. It makes you wonder if we really need to sacrifice so many animals. We should also think about whether the sacrifice of animals is in line with our scientific advances.
Of course, the fact that we now live longer and can use cosmetics with confidence is, to some extent, a result of animal testing. In many cases, animal testing has helped researchers understand the nature of diseases and developed ways to prevent them. The polio vaccine, kidney transplants, and heart surgery were all developed with the help of animal testing, as well as effective treatments for diabetes, diphtheria, and other diseases. Thanks to animal testing, the human lifespan has been extended by nearly 28 years. Even now, animal testing has played a huge role in developing breakthrough treatments for AIDS and Alzheimer’s disease. Throughout the history of animal testing, proponents of animal testing have consistently touted the important benefits it provides. They emphasized the important role that animal testing has played in the development of countless new medical treatments and techniques and in the advancement of basic biological knowledge, citing basic genetics, the treatment of cancer, heart disease, hemophilia, malaria, and spinal cord injuries as examples.
But the importance of animal testing is now a thing of the past. In 1959, Russell and Burch established principles for animal testing. These principles, known as the 3R’s, are still upheld in their original form today, and they set the standard for the application of the scientific method and the ethical use of animal testing, and various efforts are underway around the world to ensure that they are followed. The 3R’s are Reduction, Refinement, and Replacement. Reduction is the use of fewer animals to obtain the information required; refinement is the modification of existing methods to minimize pain, suffering, and anxiety; and replacement is the use of research models that do not involve animals. These principles have led to the development of many alternatives to animal testing. Alternatives to animal testing can be divided into two main categories: inanimate objects and test systems that use cell or organ cultures.
First, let’s take a look at some of the most common inanimate methods. One of the alternatives to using inanimate objects is to reduce animal testing by storing toxicological data on computers with various chemical structures and screening substances with the same chemical structure to predict their toxicity. Screening is the early detection of disease by administering appropriate tests to quickly and unambiguously identify those who have the disease or are at high risk from those who do not have symptoms of the disease. Alternatively, biosensors, which use electrochemical methods to detect biological reactions, can be used to determine the toxic response of cells or tissues. Developments in nanotechnology have made it possible to measure changes in single cells. Then there’s the use of statistics, which allows researchers to use comprehensive data to better gauge how far a disease can spread. Sometimes researchers use data from previous animal experiments. In vitro methods include using bacteria and cultured cells or tissues to replace animals. These methods are only valuable as alternatives if they reduce or replace the number of animals sacrificed in experiments. In vitro methods have the advantage of not only replacing animal testing, but also being economical and quick to test. The alternatives presented here are not exhaustive. Many other alternatives have already been discovered and are more than capable of replacing animal testing. One of the best examples of an alternative to animal testing is pregnancy diagnostics. From the mid-1920s to the early 1960s, pregnancy was diagnosed by injecting pregnant women’s urine into rabbits and watching for antibodies to develop in their ovaries. This process required the sacrifice of the rabbits by autopsying them to identify their ovaries. Today, the immune response to HCG is used to diagnose pregnancy quickly and easily.
Although animal testing is routinely used to develop medical procedures and treatments, it is difficult to make an accurate factual statement about the underlying role that animal use played in any particular medical advance. Researchers cannot prove that animal testing is fundamentally responsible for any success they achieve. In fact, even if there is an underlying link between the use of animals in experiments and the benefits they bring to human health, it is a very weak one. When it comes to information about the effectiveness of animal testing, it has been shown that animals are different from humans, often reacting very differently to drugs, and that they are only 5-25% successful at predicting the risk of a product as a chemical. Furthermore, contrary to the common belief that animal testing is necessary for human health purposes, empirical evidence suggests that it has had the opposite effect. Drugs that pass animal tests have been shown to have serious side effects when applied to humans, and in some cases, even kill them. For example, several studies up until 1963 showed a strong correlation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, but animal studies failed to prove the link because the animal data didn’t match the human data. In the end, many people died from lung cancer. In another example, by the early 1940s, it was clear that asbestos was a cause of lung cancer in humans, but animal experiments failed to confirm the dangers of asbestos. As a result, asbestos was used unregulated in the United States for decades.
We can see from the benefits and risks of animal testing that the number of animals sacrificed in animal testing is not directly proportional to human health gains or scientific advances. Because of these problems, we do not believe that animal testing is necessary to improve human welfare. Although animal testing was considered very useful in the past, now that we are in the 21st century and have made great strides in developing alternatives to animal testing, it is likely that we will be able to replace it. Also, in terms of human moral concepts and animal welfare, I believe that animals are sentient and deserve “equal consideration” to that given to humans, so using them to test pain levels or for horrific experiments like toxicity tests goes too far. Stopping unnecessary animal testing in advance would be a good thing for many reasons.