Should Animals Be Used in Medical Research?
Should animals be used in medical research? The use of animals in laboratory research is a very well known debate. Many people wonder if the animals are treated well and if they are taken care of properly; however, if medical and scientifical experimentation were done in only human trials the knowledge and understanding of how drugs and procedures can affect human would be decades behind. That is why the use of animals in experimentation is a necessity in order to continue advancing medicine and science.
Animals have a high reproductive rate and are easy to breed. Animals have the same organs and tissues as humans do making them a good match. Animals that are used in experimentation are generally small and are easy to keep and feed. It is the best way to learn the effects of substances in a living body because animals are very easy to breed and yield a high amount of offspring. A higher number of offspring allows for a greater number of experiments or trials to be performed at a time.
The greater the number of trials that can be performed will increase the data that can be collected to increase the accuracy of the trial. If a drug was tested on humans and the first two people to take the drug died, chances are the drug would be discontinued and research shut down, even if the deaths were only coincidence. By having a big sample size of animals that can test the effects to see how fatal the drug is and determine how it can be improved. Even if many experiments have expected results the effects of a drug could be wide spread.
This is why using animals as a match for humans is advantageous because it allow scientists to observe the effects on living tissue under controlled circumstances in many subjects, and collect appropriate data so the margin of error can be made as small as possible. The ability to see the consequences of drugs on animals its success rate because it avoids death of many people who could be used as subject. Without using animals in research labs, our progression with medicine and medical sciences would slow down dramatically.
Every day new medicines and practices are coming out that, without the help of animals, would never make it to us. They might make it to us, but only after blindly testing on random human volunteers that could possibly die just as easily from the testing as a rat would if used in the humans place To sump, I would say that many of the medications and procedures that we currently use today wouldn’t exist and the development of future treatments would be extremely limited. Animal testing is the right way to test products. Animals have the right to live their own life; and we are not allowed to mess around with them just because we can.
