Animals in laboratories are also subject to mistreatment by inexperienced or careless staff. Although there are penalties for laboratories when animals are injured or killed due to negligence, in reality the fines are typically either very small or waived entirely. In some cases, animals die as a direct result of the experiment. It is extremely rare that animals are either adopted out or placed into a sanctuary after research is conducted on them.
However, more and more states are passing laws that require laboratories, when possible, to offer dogs and cats to shelters and other rescue organizations so they can be adopted. The Animal Welfare Act was designed to protect certain animals, like dogs and monkeys, used in experiments, but the law only offers minimal standards for housing, food and exercise.
The Animal Welfare Act also stipulates that the proposed experiments be reviewed by an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, which is appointed by the laboratory itself and largely made up of employees of the institution.
The animals most commonly used in experiments—rats, mice and birds bred to be used in experiments—are not counted in annual USDA statistics and are not afforded the minimal protections provided under the Animal Welfare Act.
Animals such as fish, frogs, turtles, octopuses and crabs are also not covered by the Animal Welfare Act. It also makes it difficult to determine the extent to which non-animal alternative methods are used. The vast majority of experiments on animals are not required by government law or regulation, although certain animal tests are required by government agencies to assess the safety of products such as industrial chemicals, pesticides, medical devices and medicines.
The Food and Drug Administration FDA , which regulates various products such as drugs, medical devices and food, fragrances and color additives, will not approve potential drugs unless they are first tested on animals, which usually includes dogs. Additional tests for pesticides and drugs are carried out on rats, rabbits, mice, birds and primates.
These types of tests have been performed for years, regardless of whether they provide valuable information. While some regulatory agencies, like the EPA, are now taking a critical look at these tests and determining if they provide information necessary for assessing how safe a product or substance is for humans, or if better approaches are available, others have done little. More efforts can be made by agencies to invest in and encourage the development of non-animal methods.
Swapping animal experiments for non-animal alternative methods seems like a straightforward process, given that using animals has so many limitations and sophisticated new technologies offer countless possibilities for creating experiments that are more humane and more applicable to humans. Unfortunately, developing these alternatives is a complex process and involves many obstacles, including inadequate funding and concerns that regulators will not accept test data from new, non-animal methods.
In some cases, a non-animal alternative must be formally validated—an expensive and lengthy process—in order to be accepted by government regulatory agencies. In contrast, animal experiments have never been subjected to the same level of scrutiny and validation. Despite these challenges, many scientists are increasingly committed to developing and using non-animal methods. While we are not there yet, the world is moving toward a future dominated by sophisticated methods that use human cells, tissues and organs, 3D printing, robotics, computer models and other technologies to create approaches to testing and research that do not rely on animals.
These methods are often faster, less expensive and more effective than current animal experiments and will only continue to improve over time—while animal testing will always have severe limitations.
A concerted effort to shift funding and technological development toward more non-animal alternatives will lead us toward a future where animal experiments will become a thing of the past. We advocate for replacing animals with non-animal alternative methods when they are available and funding the development of new alternative methods to quickly replace antiquated animal tests and experiments. Our two main areas of focus are ending cosmetics animal testing and ending experiments on dogs.
We—along with our partner, Humane Society International —are committed to ending cosmetics animal testing forever. Through our Be Cruelty-Free campaign, we are working in the United States and around the globe to create a world where animals no longer have to suffer to produce lipstick and shampoo. We educate consumers about animals used in cruel and unnecessary cosmetics tests and how to shop for cruelty-free cosmetics and personal care products.
We found that the U. Dogs were subjected to multiple surgeries, fitted with equipment to impair their heart function and implanted with devices to alter normal bodily functions. Following the conclusion of an experiment, dogs are typically killed instead of being adopted into loving homes. We consume over times the number of pigs than the number used in research.
We eat over chickens for each animal used in a research facility, and almost 9, chickens for every animal used in research covered by the Animal Welfare Act. For every animal used in research, it is estimated that 14 more are killed on our roads. All reports before include species totals for all years back to Skip to content In , US government statistics put the number of laboratory animals used in research at ,, an increase of 2.
Click to enlarge. The statistical data totals for all pain categories , do not match the total number of animals , The USDA has previously issued corrections to their reports and it is likely that they will do so again. For example, in the United States, up to 90 percent of the animals used in laboratories purpose-bred rats, mice and birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles and invertebrates are excluded from the official statistics, meaning that figures published by the U.
Department of Agriculture are no doubt a substantial underestimate. Within the European Union, more than 12 million animals are used each year, with France, Germany and the United Kingdom being the top three animal using countries. Although these animals still endure the stresses and deprivation of life in the sterile laboratory environment, their lives are not recorded in official statistics. HSI believes that complete transparency about animal use is vital and that all animals bred, used or killed for the research industry should be included in official figures.
See some animal use statistics. For nearly a century, drug and chemical safety assessments have been based on laboratory testing involving rodents, rabbits, dogs, and other animals. Aside from the ethical issues they pose—inflicting both physical pain as well as psychological distress and suffering on large numbers of sentient creatures—animal tests are time- and resource-intensive, restrictive in the number of substances that can be tested, provide little understanding of how chemicals behave in the body, and in many cases do not correctly predict real-world human reactions.
Trying to mirror human diseases or toxicity by artificially creating symptoms in mice, dogs or monkeys has major scientific limitations that cannot be overcome.
Very often the symptoms and responses to potential treatments seen in other species are dissimilar to those of human patients. As a consequence, nine out of every 10 candidate medicines that appear safe and effective in animal studies fail when given to humans.
Drug failures and research that never delivers because of irrelevant animal models not only delay medical progress, but also waste resources and risk the health and safety of volunteers in clinical trials. The sequencing of the human genome and birth of functional genomics, the explosive growth of computer power and computational biology, and high-speed robot automation of cell-based in vitro screening systems, to name a few, has sparked a quiet revolution in biology.
Together, these innovations have produced new tools and ways of thinking that can help uncover exactly how chemicals and drugs disrupt normal processes in the human body at the level of cells and molecules. From there, scientists can use computers to interpret and integrate this information with data from human and population-level studies.
First, animals' rights are violated when they are used in research. Tom Regan, a philosophy professor at North Carolina State University, states: "Animals have a basic moral right to respectful treatment. This inherent value is not respected when animals are reduced to being mere tools in a scientific experiment" qtd.
Animals and people are alike in many ways; they both feel, think, behave, and experience pain. Thus, animals should be treated with the same respect as humans. Yet animals' rights are violated when they are used in research because they are not given a choice. Animals are subjected to tests that are often painful or cause permanent damage or death, and they are never given the option of not participating in the experiment.
Regan further says, for example, that "animal [experimentation] is morally wrong no matter how much humans may benefit because the animal's basic right has been infringed.
Risks are not morally transferable to those who do not choose to take them" qtd. Animals do not willingly sacrifice themselves for the advancement of human welfare and new technology.
Their decisions are made for them because they cannot vocalize their own preferences and choices. When humans decide the fate of animals in research environments, the animals' rights are taken away without any thought of their well-being or the quality of their lives.
Therefore, animal experimentation should be stopped because it violates the rights of animals. Next, the pain and suffering that experimental animals are subject to is not worth any possible benefits to humans. Animals feel pain in many of the same ways that humans do; in fact, their reactions to pain are virtually identical both humans and animals scream, for example. When animals are used for product toxicity testing or laboratory research, they are subjected to painful and frequently deadly experiments.
Two of the most commonly used toxicity tests are the Draize test and the LD50 test, both of which are infamous for the intense pain and suffering they inflect upon experimental animals. In the Draize test the substance or product being tested is placed in the eyes of an animal generally a rabbit is used for this test ; then the animal is monitored for damage to the cornea and other tissues in and near the eye.
This test is intensely painful for the animal, and blindness, scarring, and death are generally the end results.
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