ANIMALS FOR RESEARCH

Mahatma Gandhi once said "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be
judged by the way its animals are treated". Over the years, animals have been used to be an
object for experiment. In fact, early Greek physician-scientists, such as Aristotle and Galen had
performed experiments on living animals. Scientist and experts believe that drugs safe for
animals is also safe for humans. Over the course of time, many cases have proven that this theory
is wrong. Using animals for research mainly leads to dangerous situations and animals used in
the experiments never get fair treatments. This proves that using animals is ineffective because
it costs a huge amount of money, it causes potential harm to human and it is against animal
rights.
First, using animals for research is way more expensive than using the alternatives one.
PETA or also known as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals found that government waste
$56.4 million on animal experiments that failed to provide any useful treatments. Other than
that, when using animals, companies need to provide care, food and shelter for the animals
otherwise animals can die before getting tested. The care, food and shelter never come with a
cheap price. If they want the animals to be at their prime condition during the research then they
have to provide them with the best food or at least the good one. They also need to clean their
cage, wash and groom them so that the animals will be in a sterile condition. That means they
have to hire a worker to do it. Another money on the count. Besides that, they also have to
provide the animals with a shelter like cage. Let's say they can manage the money for food, care
and shelter but what about the research itself? Even the greatest scientist can't finish an
experiment in a week. They can proceed the experiments more than months even years. That
means during that time, their budget will double up according to how long the experiments take.
So how about if they use wild animals like chimpanzee and orangutan. Animals like that only live
in some countries. If they want to use that kind of animals, they need to buy them first and ship
them. Imagine how much money they will spend compare to the alternative one. Empiriko, a
biotechnology company produces a synthetic livers that predict livers metabolic reactions to drug
quicker, more precisely and cheaper. For the same result without using alternative ways,
researcher needs to test the drug on 1000 rats and 100 dogs. Which is why, researcher should
use alternative way that is cheaper and quicker rather than using animals that is expensive and
ineffective.
Second, using animals for research never guarantees it will work in human, it can cause
unwanted harms in human. Based on the data, 94% of drugs that pass animal tests fail in human
clinical trials. In 1999, Vioxx was released to the market proving that it can treat arthritis after
testing it in monkeys and five other animal species. However, the effect of it in human is the
opposite of it in the animals. Vioxx caused around 320,000 heart attacks and strokes and 140,000
deaths worldwide. Another example is Aspirin. When the researcher test Aspirin in animals, it
proves that it is dangerous to some animals. However, now Aspirin proves that it is safe for
human and has saved many life. What is the reason behind all of this? It is because animals’ body
works differently from human body. Recent analysis state that, mice, the most common test
subject only have 50% DNA similarity with human. Another one, take example of a dog.
Chocolate, grapes, raisins, avocados and macadamia nuts are harmless in people but toxic to
dogs. Animals anatomic, metabolic, and cellular are a lot different from human, making animals
a not reliable test subject.
The last one is animals used in research receive cruel treatments and against the animal
rights. Animals is a living object that can suffer and hurt too. During the research, animals receive
a lot of inhumane treatment. They are force to inhale and eat dangerous chemicals. For example,
during toxicity test, researchers forcefully inject dangerous chemical daily for seven days a week,
for up to two years. Some of the animals even died during the process. Cosmetic company that
produce shampoo tested the irritation effect on rabbit. They held open rabbit's eyes with clips
and left it open for several days. Other company use electric shock and implanting electrodes
that can cause blindness and brain damages on animals. There are also cases where companies
tested a make-up product on animals’ skin that can lead to burned skin and infection. Other than
that, animals can also suffered a trauma. For many years, they are locked in a narrow cage
without a chance to breathe fresh air. Every day they are abused and hurt and sooner or later
they will become stressed.
To conclude, animals for research has never been effective because it is really expensive,
it causes unwanted harm to human and it suffers the animals in a cruel way. Researchers and
companies should now stop using animals for their research and try using alternatives ways. With
a lot of breakthrough in technology, finding alternatives will not become a very hard matter. With
this, animals can be free and live in their natural habitat. Hopefully, in the near future,
researchers and companies will all use a more effective way and continue to develop useful things
for humanity.
Question
1. What is the alternative ways for toxicity test??
There are a lot of different ways other than using animals, first using the syntetic liver by
empiriko that i have mention before or companies can also use in vitro method which is a
models based on human cell and tissue cultures that are more reliable.

2. Is there any rules or regulations about the use of animals in research, and if there is any, why
companies and researchers still use that??
There is actually a rule about the animals protection made by the government. But the problem
is, the regulations only regulate about the standard of care that a company needs to provide for
the animals. It doesn't protect animals from the harm during the research itself. So the point is
the rules don't protect the animals enough that company still can use them without getting
bothered by the rules.

3. How important is organization like PETA and many others non government organization that
support animals protection?
Before PETA, people were protesting individually, unorganizely and the impact was to small for a
big change. Organization like PETA help make the impact even bigger in our society. They have a
clear structure of organization and their member is filled with important people from different
backgrounds that genuinely want to help animals. It helps promoting the shop cruelty-free
campaign and creating a large scale and long term changes.

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