This is taken from a school essay I wrote for
Philosophy and Ethics. I don't necessarily support animal testing, before the
Animal Liberation Front gets any ideas...
Many
anti-vivisection campaigners like to wave around the "fact" that
vivisection and animal research has accomplished nothing whatsoever, and use it often in
campaign literature. However, when one looks at the statistics, it is obvious that it is not the case.
For a start, animal research is inexpensive compared to other forms of research. For every pound spent on medical research, five pence is spent on animal research. Also, if it is cruel to use animals in this way, what about the two million
cats and
dogs abandoned each year (including the two hundred a day handled by the
RSPCA) and the eight hundred million animals slaughtered for our consumption, such as
cows,
pigs,
chickens and
turkeys. The 2.6 million animals used each year in medical research pales in comparison to these millions of animals. The industry is very
tightly regulated, and as such the animals are treated with the utmost care.
We need to be able to evaluate the effects of new drugs and treatments in a
living body, as there is no
computer simulation which can simulate the
complex body systems of a living being, and testing on humans would be seen and incredibly
unethical.
Many of our cancer treatments, which save hundreds, even thousands of people a year, such as
radiotherapy (using targeted gamma rays to kill rapidly dividing cells such as the cancerous cells in the tumour) and
chemotherapy (using drugs for the same purpose) were first developed and proven with animal research.
Many tools to treat coronary heart disease, such as the
heart/lung machine, the
coronary bypass operation, the pacemaker and
beta-blocking drugs (which reduce blood pressure and stave off
heart attacks) were first tested on animals, and now save thousands of lives every year.
This shows that animal research saves thousands, maybe millions of lives each and every year.
YMMV.