Against Animal Testing

*95% of animals used for experiments are not protected by the Animal Welfare Act, the only act governing animal testing. Laws protecting animals need to include test animals used for experiments and these laws should be more strongly enforced. In order to minimize the number of animals used for testing and make sure they are not mistreated, the laws need to make it harder for researchers to use animals, making alternatives more appealing.
Many people would agree that animal testing is morally wrong. As animal rights activist Justin Goodman puts it, "Mice are like us in all the ways that matter, so they're used as stand-ins for humans - but the moral significance of those similarities is ignored." Chimpanzees share 99% of their DNA with humans,
In these experiments, there are tons of sources of error. They do not live in a human-like environment, instead they are confined and distressed. Secondly, researchers deliberately infect the animals with diseases they would not normally contract, after being healthy to begin with. Many drugs have varying results between different animals, and animals and humans. For example, penicillin kills guinea pigs, but does nothing to rabbits. According to the food and drug administration, 92% of drugs that pass animal tests fail human tests. Some chemicals that are harmful to animals are okay for humans, as well as the other way around. Animals are being sacrificed for experiments that don’t even have accurate or useful results. If the regulations for the environment test animals live in are enforced, it can reduce some of the factors that make an experiment not a fair
This is true, but it overlooks that someone will still have to be the first human to test the product regardless. The Food and Drug administration requires some testing, but there are alternatives that cost less and take less time, and are more accurate than animal testing. Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering has created “organs on chips” which are made with living human cells. These chips can replace animal testing in the future. Wyss researchers wrote on the organs-on-chips project page, "Clinical studies take years to complete and testing a single compound can cost more than $2 million. Meanwhile, innumerable animal lives are lost, and the process often fails to predict human responses." In conclusion, in order to end animal testing, it needs to be harder to violate the Animal Welfare Act and more appealing to consider alternatives. I wish to end with a quote by Professor Charles R. Magel, “Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: ‘Because they are like us,’ ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: ‘Because the animals are not like