Final Essay
An estimated 26 million of non-human animals
are used every year in the United States for scientific and commercial testing;
and the research on living non-human animals has been practiced since at least
500 BC. This information produces me discomfort. We really need to use
non-human animals to increase the quality and duration of human lives? Why not
to choose humans for purposes that are humans?
The industry and the scientific world
commonly use animals to develop medical treatments, to determine the toxicity
of medications or to check the safety of products destined for human use. In a few words, as far as the scientists are
concerned, the use of non-human animals it comes down to its functionality, sadly like simple things. Today we perfectly use new methods that can replace the need for
animals. We have in vitro testing; we have in the world people that would love
to participate voluntarily in some researches and we have HUMAN NEEDS.
Like I said before, I think that the animal
testing is cruel and inhumane, and specifically when we talk about the use of
species of animals for research purposes. I am familiarized with this actions
because in the Faculty we have an Experimental Psychology Lab and there we can
find some investigative works that include rats as experimental subjects. Animals
used in experiments are commonly subjected to force feeding, forced inhalation,
food and water deprivation, prolonged periods of physical restraint, the
infliction of burns and other wounds to study the healing process, the
infliction of pain to study its effects and remedies, and "killing by
carbon dioxide asphyxiation, neck-breaking, decapitation, etc. In the field of
research related to Psychology, usually the animals are used to study the
physiological basis of behavior or to expand knowledge about conditioning. I
looks like these things can be studying with/in human subjects.
As can be seen, we have certain knowledge
gaps, but these are our knowledge
gaps. We cannot use non-human animals to solve our “human” problems. We cannot
use non-human animals when their welfare is at stake. There are other ways to
achieve our painful purposes. For that I said that it should be forbidden to
use species of animals for research purposes.
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