Animal Experimentation Analysis

(Hum)animal Experimentation
Can animals feel pain, suffer from depression, or even contemplate suicide? The rising number of animal rights protests has caused scientists to ask themselves these questions. While discovering new medications is important for the public health, the welfare of animals has been brought to experts’ attention. For example, in “The Flaws and Human Harms of Animal Experimentation,” neurologist and public health specialist Aysha Akhtar wants every aspect of drug testing using animals to end due to the lack of recent advancements and the increasing harm that animals experience. She shows that the genetic relationship between humans and animals form unreliable experimentation can cause harm to humans. However, there are
Chan and Harris in conjunction with Grimm believe the main reason testing should be stopped is because it is unethical. Akhtar discusses multiple incidents in which the drugs being tested pass in animals yet fail in humans. She argues, “If experimentation using chimpanzees and other NHPs, our closest genetic cousins, are unreliable, how can we expect research using other animals to be reliable” (Akhtar)? The orders are too highly separated to determine whether it is effective, creating her argument that it should be stopped completely. Chan and Harris along with Grimm both discuss how experimentation could be completely beneficial if it is done properly. Grimm states that at the present, it is not at all clear how to prove that the expected benefits of a study outweigh the harm to the animals. He suggests an analysis that could potentially determine whether the harm to an animal would be justified or not enough to hold the experiment. While Chan and Harris think that the genetics are similar enough that hum-animals, human embryos with “animal bits” genetically inserted, could be used to discover cures for animals as well as for humans (Chan, Harris 485). However, they insist the science behind the experiments is minute compared to the abuse occurring in the experimentation and want to end all suffering that would occur with
Grimm purposes adding more regulations, Chan and Harris promote the creation of human embryos with animal bits to produce morals, and Akhtar utilizing scientific viewpoints to end experimentation. Each article is defining what can be expected from experimentation and how to improve the field to improve human and animal welfare. While some arguments may be stronger than others, each article sets up ideas that can end this long battle. Akhtar and Grimm set up platforms that can easily be grown upon by their colleagues, proving their articles to be more persuasive. In the end, the questions trying to be answered were spelled out back in the 1800s by Jeremy Bentham, “The question is not, can they reason? Nor, can they talk?, but can they