Can animal testing meet human needs and ethical values at the same time?

Animal testing does not meet human needs and is immoral. Alternatives should be explored.

 

Historically, humans have valued animals according to how much they serve their interests, and this instrumental view is deeply ingrained in human traditions and habits. Whether they are our food, keep us comfortable and entertained, provide us with clothing and household goods, or fight for us, the idea that animals exist to fulfil human desires has been passed down from ancient times to the present without question or criticism. However, people have begun to challenge this amoral perception of animals, arguing that animals have intrinsic value beyond their instrumental value to humans. Realising that animals are not just moving tools without souls, minds, emotions, and personalities, but emotionally rich oil wells, we began to focus on the immoral acts towards animals that have been a natural part of our lives. We found that animal testing is a completely immoral act that does not promote human needs and has no justification. By vital human needs, we mean the absolute necessities of survival, or in modern times, health and longevity, and animal testing continues to be used to satisfy these needs. We will discuss the problematic and ongoing use of animal testing from a bioethics and morality perspective, dividing it into three main categories: product testing, medical testing, and military testing, and discussing the seriousness of human treatment of animals in testing, the ineffectiveness of testing, and practical alternatives to testing.
Product testing is both immoral and unnecessary, as neither product testing nor the new products that are marketed as a result of it serve any of our most pressing human needs. Product testing is the testing of newly developed products to see how toxic they are to humans, and rigorous toxicity tests are conducted on laboratory animals before they are released to the market. The most widely known toxicity tests are the Draize test and the LD-50 test. In the Draize test, rabbits or dogs are isolated, their heads are pinned down, and experimental substances such as ink, bleach, or dish soap are placed inside their eyelids to see how much pus forms in their eyes, how much they become infected with pathogens, and how much they bleed. The tests are repeated several times over a period of up to three weeks, during which time the test subjects are made to suffer extreme pain and eventually slaughtered. The LD-50 test determines how much of an experimental substance is required to kill 50% of the animals. LD stands for Lethal Dose and 50 stands for 50%. The test is performed by inserting a tube down the throat and injecting the test product, such as lipstick, toothpaste, or paper, into the stomach. This can last up to six months or until half of the test group is dead, at which point all survivors are slaughtered. Aside from the alleged necessity of toxicity testing, the extreme cruelty that animals are subjected to during the testing process, deprived of their right to life, is the cruelty of human selfishness, and it is never justified to sacrifice animals for our own benefit. The new products created by testing are not absolutely necessary for humans, nor are they essential for survival, so it is not an exaggeration to call for an end to toxicity testing, to stop creating new products, and to improve the quality of life by improving the products that already exist. Commercial product testing has nothing to do with human needs, and the products being tested are not things we need. It is driven by corporate “economic” interests, the selfish desire for companies to make easy money from new products.
While the development of new medicines through medical testing may seem to be in the interest of improving quality of life, which is a pressing human concern, it is inefficient and extremely dangerous for medical products for humans to be tested on animals and then marketed. It’s important to know that animal testing can actually pose a threat to humans. In fact, non-human animals are anatomically, psychologically, genetically, immunologically, and histologically different from humans, making it difficult to directly apply the results of animal testing to humans and posing enormous risks. A famous example is the drug thalidomide, an anti-emetic used to relieve morning sickness in pregnant women. It was tested in pregnant dogs, cats, monkeys, and chickens and was marketed without any problems in the offspring, but in humans, the fetuses were severely deformed and died. More recently, the drug opren, which treats arthritis, was marketed after being tested on animals and can cause 3,600 side effects in humans, the Physicians for Responsible Medicine reported. Also, zipeprol, a drug that stops coughing, was tested on animals and passed, but people suffered seizures and comas after taking it. Furthermore, many countries have some sort of toxicity control centres, which collect data from toxicity tests on animals when people swallow suspect substances. However, Dr Christopher Smith, an internist in Long Beach, California, has raised the pointlessness of these centres: “The results of these tests do nothing to predict the effects of toxicity when humans are exposed to poisons, or to inform treatment… The urgent care physician can only refer to case reports, clinical experience, and empirical data from clinical trials in humans when looking for the best way to treat his or her patients.” These are just a few of the many examples of animal testing failures and their adverse effects on humans, and the overall conclusion is that it is difficult to extrapolate findings from animal testing to humans, and that overconfidence in animal testing threatens the very health and longevity that humans desperately need. Of course, science evolves through trial and error, and perfection is rarely achieved from the outset. There are patients whose quality of life has been improved by drugs introduced through animal testing. However, when we see that drugs that humans trust unquestioningly and unwaveringly threaten to take away the life of a living organism and even lead to its death, it is clear that testing on animals that are biologically different from us, even at the expense of countless animals, is unreliable because they do not have the exact effect on humans. And with so many failures and contradictions, the weight of the problem of the irresponsible act of killing so many animals by continuing the experiment without acknowledging the biological differences between animals and humans and their different responses to the same effects is heavy and unconscionable.
Animal testing by the military is also not in the best interest of humans. The military straps monkeys to primate equilibrium platforms (PEPs) and shocks them with radiation and electric shocks to test their balance to see how well they perform under lethal doses of radiation to see how it affects airplane pilots. At Fort Detrick in Maryland, 60 beagles are fed TNT to see if they develop dehydration, anaemia, jaundice, diarrhoea, and death. At the Ministry of Defence Research Laboratory in Portadown, UK, several animals are injected with glutamate and monitored for symptoms such as death, dehydration, diarrhoea, and convulsions. These military experiments do not provide the facts that humans desperately need and are simply animal cruelty. It is not right to sacrifice an animal’s life when it does not contribute to a pressing human need.
While vivisection is unnecessary, most animals bred for experiments die before they can be used properly. After using far more animals than are actually needed for the experiment, the remaining animals are slaughtered. The UK Alliance for the Abolition of Cruelty to Animals estimates that 85 per cent of large rats and 80 per cent of mice used in experiments are killed without being used, out of concern that they could be released into the ecosystem and mutate simply because of their participation in the experiment itself. With so many animals being killed without ever being used in experiments, how can we ‘replace’ the animals that are unnecessarily killed for medical research?
Cell and tissue culture allows human cells and tissues to be kept in culture and used in medical experiments. Because human cells are used, the results can be directly extrapolated to humans, unlike animal tests. Cell and tissue cultures are inexpensive and easy to produce, so they are readily available. For new drugs, the gaps in tissue culture experiments need to be filled by other techniques, as they need to be tested across all human organs. The other option is physicochemical methods such as density spectroscopy and gas and liquid chromatography. These methods allow researchers to see what biological substances their experimental materials turn into. For example, in animal experiments, rats were artificially induced to develop a disease called mastopathy and then given vitamin D to determine the effectiveness and dosage of vitamin D. Now we can use the humane method of liquid chromatography to find out. In addition, drug discovery experiments that are not completed in tissue culture can be carried out through computer simulations. Computer-aided drug discovery can replace many animals because it allows for the creation of drugs with the required potency. Of course, even with all the options available, it is not possible to replace all medical experiments with laboratory animals. However, it is clear that the use of animals can be significantly reduced by properly utilising these alternatives.
Almost all animal testing does not serve the urgent interests of humans, and instead serves other interests, such as life, health, and happiness, and furthermore, it serves human greed and economic gain through animal testing. Even if many biotechnological experiments are intended to promote the vital interests of humans, they are ineffective. Animals are different from humans in many ways, and it is futile to try to find phenomena in animals that are relevant to humans. Therefore, it is immoral and unreasonable to perform these tests on them. Most of these experiments are “unjustified” and we need to find alternatives, even if it takes time. These alternatives may be slower to develop than animal testing, but they must be guided by ethics and morality. The future of humans will continue to evolve in a world where all life forms coexist.