15th August 2017

Animal Experimentation

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Experiments on Animals

 

Experiments continue to be performed on animals all around the world. Animals are taken to be tested on. Animal testing is the use of non-human animals in experiments that look to control the variables that affect the behavior or biological system under study. Today i’m going to talk to you about animal Experimentation. I will go over how many are tested each year, what happens to them during and after they are tested and an alternative to the use of animals being tested.

If someone was to ask you how many animals were experimented on in laboratories each year what would you guess ? 1 million, 10 million, 50 million. Every year more than 100 million animals, such as frogs, dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs, monkeys, fish, and birds are killed,  just the US.  In new zealand on average there are 300,000 animals experimented on each year including animals from the list above and deer, cows and pig. It is very hard to get an accurate number on how many animals are experimented for example in the united states up to 90% of animals used in laboratories are excluded from the official statistics. So the number of animals experimented on  each year is not very accurate because some countries don’t have laws in animal experimentation so they simply don’t need to collect information on the use of animals. These are tested on in laboratories for biology lessons, medical training, curiosity driven experiments, and chemical, drug, food and cosmetic testing. The numbers are just way too high and needs to be decreasing.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

After animals are tested on.The sad reality of animal testing is that while the act itself is terrible, very few people often get past that sad fact to think about what happens to the animals after testing is over. Depending on what has happened to the animal can change what happens to it afterwards. In many cases the animal is too sick or in to much pain that they have to be quickly killed. Often they are euthanised, gassed or the smaller animals were killed with physical force such as decapitation or breaking the animal’s spine and larger animals like sheep are often electrocuted. This is tried to be done as fast possible. Some animals are also bred for specific reason or purpose so they would not be able to be in a normal home environment. Adoption is very rare but can happen in some cases when the animal has not undergone anything too serious they able to go up for adoption. The problem is that nobody will take them in so they will have to be Euthanised at the adoption shelter if they stay in there to long. This shows that the animals are just used and thrown away like rubbish because people aren’t changing their ways.

An alternative to animals being tested on.  An alternative to animal testing does not mean putting human patients at risk or stopping medical progress at all. There are already new option to testing on animals. Statistics show that 85% of experiments are conducted on rats and mice which aren’t very similar to humans. Scientist will then say “well, we have chimpanzees.” We share 98.4% of our DNA with chimpanzees but yet that tiny difference has a big impact in terms of biological effects because chimpanzees are immune to at least three disease that are deadly to humans: HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis B and common malaria. The Food and Drug Administration  (FDA) has noted that 92% of all drugs that have been shown as safe or effective on animals tests have failed on human test or have been to dangerous to try. Which is why there needs to be an alternative to animals not just because of the cruelty of the experiments. Some alternatives are:

 

 “  in vitro (test tube) test methods and models based on human cell and tissue cultures”: this would be like using human cell tissue in test tubes or in glass and testing on the cell.“computerized patient-drug databases and virtual drug trials”                                                                          “stem cell and genetic testing methods”Those are just some of the alternatives to animal experimentation.  

 

All around the world there is a problem with animal experimentation. It needs to be stopped. Today I have talked about the large amount animals tested on each year, what happens to the animals after the experiment and the alternative to animal testing. From this we know that not only is it a terrible act that it is “bad science”, not getting very successful results and there are other option that don’t harm anybody. This shows that there is no care for these animals so people are not worried what happens to them so nothing is changed.

 

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