Animal Testing Doesn't Work

TW: graphic language, animal abuse

Inside animal testing facilities non-human animals are subject to unparalleled suffering including bodily mutations, decapitations, radiation burns, poisoning, suffocation, and are frequently crushed, shocked and denied food or water for long periods of time. This is not only incredibly cruel but also completely unnecessary. The stress, fear, anxiety and depression present in animals in these labs means that data collected is unreliable. The New Scientist article ‘Too Stressed to Work’ expresses that stress causes a myriad of inflammatory conditions which “adds uncontrollable variables to experiments… confounding the data”. Furthermore, when we collect data from non-human animal experiments we are better understanding non-human animals… not human animals. Humans and non-humans do not share diseases and one of the fundamental flaws in animal experimentation is our inability to create human disease within non-humans and therefore the data is useless. For example, if we were to give a dog diabetes and then conduct experiments on them we would be left with answers only to dog diabetes, not human diabetes. This data is non-transferable. Not only does non-human animal experimentation provide no help in understanding human disease, it also often hinders us from from helpful experimentations by misleading us. One of the researchers from the Diabetic Research Institute announced “We can no longer rely on studies on [non-humans]. It is now imperative that we focus on human islets. At the end of the day, it is the only way to understand how they function.” When we conduct the same experiments on different species of animals we see different results, clearly showing the unreliability of the experiments altogether. Experimenters have attempted to use pigs and primates to experiment on to yield better results but even though we share 98% of our DNA with them, that 2% difference in our gene function and DNA sequence is enough to invalidate experiments. For example, around 90 HIV/AIDS vaccines were tested on chimpanzees and other primates showing a positive result but none of them worked on humans. Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was also tested on primates and was celebrated as a successful preventative drug for heart disease and strokes. There was a campaign to prescribe it to millions of people and now we know it to actively increase the risk of heart disease. As a last example of so many we could mention, in the early 1960s after copious amounts of animal experiments, thalidomide was hailed as a wonder drug to help relieve symptoms of nausea in pregnant women. It caused over 10,000 severe birth defects, including phocomelia, in children soon after known as ‘thalidomide babies’ or ‘flipper babies’ due to the severity of their limb deformities. Animal testing has long been rendered obsolete and advances in other toxicology technologies have far surpassed this outdated and unnecessarily brutal practice. Despite this, the animal testing industry has grown, health care costs have risen, tragedies continue to occur and drugs remain unsafe due to a lack of funding for stem cell research and other more accurate forms of testing.