Animal Testing

Animal Testing

Using animals for testing is wrong and should be banned. They have rights just as we do. Twenty-four hours a day humans are using defenseless animals for cruel and most often useless tests. The animals have no way of fighting back. This is why there should be new laws to protect them. These legislations also need to be enforced more regularly. Too many criminals get away with murder.

Although most labs are run by private companies, often experiments are conducted by public organizations. The US government, Army and Air force in particular, has designed and carried out many animal experiments. The purposed experiments were engineered so that many animals would suffer and die without any certainty that this suffering and death would save a single life, or benefit humans in anyway at all; but the same can be said for tens of thousands of other experiments performed in the US each year. Limiting it to just experiments done on beagles, the following might sock most people: For instance, at the Lovelace Foundation, Albuquerque, New Mexico, experimenters forced sixty-four beagles to inhale radioactive Strontium 90 as part of a larger ^Fission Product Inhalation Program^ which began in 1961 and has been paid for by the US Atomic Energy Commission. In this experiment Twenty-five of the dogs eventually died. One of the deaths occurred during an epileptic seizure; another from a brain hemorrhage. Other dogs, before death, became feverish and anemic, lost their appetites, and had hemorrhages. The experimenters in their published report, compared their results with that of other experiments conducted at the University of Utah and the Argonne National Laboratory in which beagles were injected with Strontium 90. They concluded that the dose needed to produce ^early death^ in fifty percent of the sample group differed from test to test because the dogs injected with Strontium 90 retain more of the radioactive substance than dogs forced to inhale it. Also, at the University of Rochester School Of Medicine a group of experimenters put fifty beagles in wooden boxes and irradiated them with different levels of radiation by x-rays. Twenty-one of the dogs died within the first two weeks. The experimenters determined the dose at which fifty percent of the animals will die with ninety-five percent confidence. The irritated dogs vomited, had diarrhea, and lost their appetites. Later, they hemorrhaged from the mouth, nose, and eyes. In their report, the experimenters compared their experiment to others of the same nature that each used around seven hundred dogs. The experimenters said that the injuries produced in their own experiment were ^Typical of those described for the dog^ (Singer 30). Similarly, experimenters for the US Food and Drug Administration gave thirty beagles and thirty pigs large amounts of Methoxychlor (a pesticide) in their food, seven days a week for six months, ^In order to insure tissue damage^ (30). Within eight weeks, eleven dogs exhibited signs of ^abnormal behavior^ including nervousness, salivation, muscle spasms, and convolutions. Dogs in convultions breathed as rapidly as two hundred times a minute before they passed out from lack of oxygen. Upon recovery from an episode of convulsions and collapse, the dogs were uncoordinated, apparently blind, and any stimulus such as dropping a feeding pan, squirting water, or touching the animals initiated another convulsion. After further experimentation on an additional twenty beagles, the experimenters concluded that massive daily doses of Methoxychlor produce different effects in dogs from those produced in pigs. These three examples should be enough to show that the Air force beagle experiments were in no way exceptional. Note that all of these experiments, according to the experimenters^ own reports, obviously caused the animals to suffer considerably before dying. No steps were taken to prevent this suffering, even when it was clear that the radiation or poison had made the animals extremely sick. Also, these experiments are parts of series of similar experiments, repeated with only minor variations, that are being carried out all over the country. These experiments Do Not save human lives or improve them in any way. It was already known that Strontium 90 is unhealthy before the beagles died; and the experimenters who poisoned dogs and pigs with Methoxychlor knew beforehand that the large amounts they were feeding the animals (amounts no human could ever consume) would cause damage. In any case, as the differing results they obtained on pigs and dogs make it clear, it is not possible to reach any firm conclusion about the effects of a substance on humans from tests on other species. The practice of experimenting on non-human animals as it exists today throughout the world reveals the brutal consequences of speciesism (Singer 29).

In this country everyone is supposed to be equal,