Animal Testing Animals have been used in testing of various products for many decades. Products are usually tested somewhere before they are marketed to humans. These products vary from medical supplies to just make-up. Many animal rights activists, such as the PETA organization, have argued to get laws passed which makes such use of animals unlawful. This question of animal’s rights has been debated for many decades with out coming to any common ground between the two sides. The importance as well as the necessity of testing products on animals is not proven, so there is no way that one can say whether or not animals should be used for the testing of products.
Animals should have some sort of right to not be tested on if it is detrimental to their health, or not very significantly important to medical advances. It is also difficult to establish just how many rights should be granted to animals. Testing of cosmetic products on animals has been the center of many arguments for animal rights groups. Groups such as PETA have argued that animal testing is in humane and pointless. What gives humans the right to use animals to test these products on animals? These products that are only for our vanity, could cause the illness or death of the animal? This is not fair to the animal; the animal is going to endanger its health just for our vanity. So, should the animals be granted some right to protect themselves against such testing? When the testing of a product can endangers the life of the animal there should be some law forbidding it, that is, if it is for something as futile as cosmetics.
No animal should have his or her life endangered in order to make another animal look better. The testing of such products on animals should be outlawed, but does that mean that all testing done on animals should be abandoned? No not all testing done on animals is detrimental to the health of the animal. Some of the testing, even for cosmetics, could benefit the animal. As well as the question of, for medical purposes. The argument against using animals in medical research has also been carried on for many decades. Animal testing has lead to some of the most important discoveries in the medical world.
Important discoveries such as the developing of vaccines. Animals have died in order to save millions of humans, so is it worth it? Would scientist have found some other way of arriving at the same solutions to our health problems without testing on animals? These are some of the questions that have been raised in the discussion of animal rights as it applies to medical testing on animals. Jack H. Betting and Adrian R. Morrison in their article “Animal Research Is Vital to Medicine” they argue that without medical testing many medical advances would not have been possible.
I think that it the medical testing done on animals is very important. Many medical advances have been made possible by such testing; therefore I consider it very worthy. The life of these animals have saved the lives of millions of humans. Medical researchers use many different methods of testing medications and other medical equipment. Many of the products that are tested on animals have been tested in other ways before they are used on the animals; the only way to know how a living thing will react is to test it on some type of animal. Whether a human or not, humans have been used in medical research as well as animals.
These researchers do not use animals because it is an easy way out; they use animals because it is the best method to predict results on humans. These animals have no idea what is being done to them or how important they are. The importance of a human life outweighs that of animals, in my opinion. So I feel that the medical testing on animals should still be carried out without any objections. This question of animal rights is difficult to answer, because along with it one would have to answer just how many rights should animals have. Under present law animals are regarded as property and so the owner may decide what can be done with it.
Whether this is unfair to the animal we may never know, because the animal cannot talk. Many animals seem to be quite happy living their lives without rights, because their owners treat them well. I think that the law has taken the right steps in order to try to prevent cruelty to animals. This seems more logical to me than granting rights to an animal, who cannot speak to defend those rights, or may not even be able to grasp the concepts of rights. This point of animals not being worthy of rights was taken to an extreme by J. Neil Schulman in his article “the Illogic of Animal Rights.” Schulman believes that humans are superior to other animals and so should not give them rights.
One final thing is, who knows whether or not these animals want to be tested on or not? Some rat may have had fun while he was used for the testing of some experimental painkiller. Maybe if a monkey knew that if the drug worked on or caused a certain reaction of his body that he could save a humans life maybe he would want to try it. Maybe even some little creature enjoyed being shampooed with the newest shampoo before it was released on the market.