What If This Was You
2,300,000, that’s the number of how many animals were used in educational, medical and product experimentation in 1993, according to the Animal Care Annual Report of Activities: fiscal year 2007.These animals were often subjected to extremely painful experiments without any kind of drug to alleviate the pain, and many times these tests were inconclusive and had no benefit to research. Imagine if that animal was you, or your pet. Imagine having you skin covered in cosmetics to discover what it does to human skin.
Imagine having your head locked in a block so that someone can drip chemicals in your eyes to see how it would affect human eyes. Most people are unaware of how cruel animal testing is but today I am determined to inform you of how inhumane, costly, and unreliable animal testing and experimentation can be. In an article by Tony Romm, a writer, in March of this year NASA came under intense scrutiny because of an upcoming radiation test to be done on monkeys to see how human skin would react to the intense radiation of Mars. This experiment would cost almost $2 billion of tax payer’s money and it was against animal civil rights laws. But with the intense drop in space exploration funding congress found this to be of little importance to the country and funding for the experiment was dropped.
It’s extremely disturbing that the government would fund such extreme experiments on animals just to find out what would happen to humans in space. I personally would not want to be subjected to such painful experiments so why do we do this to animals? Because people believe that animals are very closely related to humans, but their not. According to an article by Peggy Carlson a physician in Washington D.C., in 1981 tests being done on animals to find a cure for cancer only produced questions and no answers. Irwin Bross, Ph.
D. testified before congress saying, “while conflicting animal results have often delayed and hampered advances in the war on cancer, they have never produced a single substantial advance either in the prevention or treatment of human cancer.” Also using animals in therapeutic has proven to be unreliable because Tylenol is deadly to cats but is helpful to humans and penicillin benefits humans but kills rodents. This shows that humans aren’t as closely related to animals as we think because in the time between 1976 and 1985 198 drugs were released on to the market and 52% of those had to be recalled. That’s more then half of the drugs released in an entire decade, and what’s worse is that these poor, defenseless animals were subject to torture for nothing at all.
It’s hard to grasp isn’t it. According to a study done by the Gallup Organization in 2008 64% of America’s population supported these use of animals for human medical advancement. In a study done by the same group in 2008 60% of the population supported product testing on animals, these numbers are staggering but true. Almost all of America supports the torture of animals for the advancement of human medicine. Remember when I asked you to imagine the death and torture of your pet? Well in a study done in 2006 by the Gallup Organization 45% of people in America owned a dog. Why is this relevant you ask? Its relevant because dogs made up 7% of the animals experimented on in September 2008 according to a study done by the U.
S. Department of Agriculture. 23% of the animals experimented on in the same year were rabbits. Talk about unrelated. Even some diseases weren’t cured by animal experimentation such as smallpox and scarlet fever.
These diseases were cured because of human education not because of the use of animals in research. So don’t use products tested on animals and talk to tour congressmen. Because animal testing is wrong and unreliable, our country has made advances without it. Taxpayer’s money could be used on better things like helping alcoholics or drug abusers or to pull people out of poverty. Animals can’t speak so we have to speak out for them today before it’s too late.
