Anastasia Camoctrokova Ethics in Writing 1/21/14 C Block Ethics in Animal Testing The assumption that animals are without

rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality, Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality. While morality is not ethics it is what is at the base of ethics. Ethics decide what is right or wrong in a society or group while morality is what we personally decide what is wrong or right. Schopenhauer is saying is that the idea that animal dont have rights and that the actions we take on them doesnt matter shows only cruelty and indifference. How we treat every living thing on this planet is what defines our morality. Animal testing is a serious topic, its is a controversy that has been argued over. One side say that animals are just that animals, they have no rights. The other side believes that animals have minds and think and feel just like humans do.This argument has been going on as early as 500 BC, when Aristotle believed that animals lacked intelligence and that justice didnt apply to them. Theophrastus, who was one of Aristotles successors believed the opposite, to him the animals felt pain just like humans and therefore it was an offense to the gods to experiment on them. The common good is the ethical theory that the topic benefits everyone around, from animals to humans. Utilitarianism is the theory that the topic must give the most good to the most amount of people. Animal testing is ethically wrong in the sense of the common good because it hurts animals and it hurts certain people who oppose the idea of animal testing. The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but "Can they suffer? Jeremy Bentham. Animal testing is cruelty to animals therefore it cannot be for the common

good. The labs hurt the animals and then they kill them. Thousands upon thousands of animals are used like those plastic gloves the doctor uses, good for one use but you toss it out right after you finish. According to Humane Society International, 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, or other means...The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported in 2010 that 97,123 animals suffered pain during experiments while being given no anesthesia for relief, including 1,395 primates, 5,996 rabbits, 33,652 guinea pigs, and 48,015 hamsters. (Procon.org) Animals feel the same as humans. They have nerves in their bodies so they can feel pain as much as a human. Hundreds of thousands of animals are killed for no reason. The experimentations is inhumane. Anyone who does these things to a human being would be executed or locked away for life. Animals should be treated the same as humans. The common good benefits all not only humans. Torture and cruelty on any living being is unnecessary when all it cause is needless suffering of an animal.There are alternatives to testing medication on animals and it is much more expensive to test on these animals. Artificial human skin, such as the commercially available products EpiDerm and ThinCert, is made from sheets of human skin cells grown in test tubes or plastic wells and can produce more useful results than testing chemicals on animal skin. Microfluidic chips ("organs on a chip"), which are lined with human cells and recreate the functions of human organs, are in advanced stages of development. Computer models, such as virtual reconstructions of human molecular structures, can predict the toxicity of substances without invasive experiments on animals...An "unscheduled DNA synthesis" animal test costs

$32,000, while the in vitro alternative costs $11,000. A "rat phototoxicity test" costs $11,500, whereas the non-animal equivalent costs $1,300. A "rat uterotrophic assay" costs $29,600, while the corresponding in vitro test costs $7,200. A two-species lifetime cancer study can cost from $2 million to $4 million, and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) spends $14 billion of its $31 billion annual budget on animal research. (Procon.org) There is absolutely no reason why labs should use animals instead of fake human skin or computers. We as humans are in the age of technology we can create human hearts with a machine implant computer chips into brains but for some reason labs refuse to do this instead. Using animals costs three times as much as using an alternative. Why should people put in their tax dollars when it would be spent on a expensive and cruel process. It doesnt benefit the people and it definitely doesnt benefit animals. The idea of animal testing is that it benefits humans, the research done will help cure millions of people. That is the base idea of animal testing but it is untrue. 94% of drugs that pass animal tests fail in human clinical trials. According to neurologist Aysha Akhtar, MD, MPH, over 100 stroke drugs that were effective when tested on animals have failed in humans, and over 85 HIV vaccines failed in humans after working well in non-human primates. A 2013 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) found that nearly 150 clinical trials (human tests) of treatments to reduce inflammation in critically ill patients have been undertaken, and all of them failed, despite being successful in animal tests. A 2013 study in Archives of Toxicology stated that "The low predictivity of animal experiments in research areas allowing direct comparisons of mouse versus human data puts strong doubt on the usefulness of animal data as key technology to predict human safety." (Procon.org) The tests that labs do seem pointless when studies show that most drugs that are tested on animals work only for animals. The argument that it benefits

humans is clearly false when 94% of drugs fail. Labs purposely give animals the disease like HIV or create strokes in animals. After the labs do that they create drugs to help the animals they gave the disease to. Animals and humans may be similar in genetics or organs however it shows that their body or their blood reacts in a complete different way than human bodies do. The argument that it is utilitarian, benefits the most number of people is based on a complete lie. There is no actual proof that these experimentations on animals benefit humans. It goes against the ethical idea of the common good and utilitarianism. Animal testing is a pointless endeavor. It is expensive, it doesnt help humans, it is useless since there are safer and cheaper ways, and all it does is torture and kill hundreds of thousands of animals each year. Animal testing goes against the ethical theory of the common good. The common good benefits everyone. Animal testing benefits no one, it kills animals and most drugs dont give positive results in humans. Mar. 2009, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) found 338 possible violations of the Animal Welfare Act at the federally funded New Iberia Research Center (NIRC) in Louisiana. Some of the primates housed at NIRC were suffering such severe psychological stress that they engaged in self-mutilation, "tearing gaping wounds into their arms and legs." Video footage shows infant chimps screaming as they are forcibly removed from their mothers, infant primates awake and alert during painful experiments, and chimpanzees being intimidated and shot with a dart gun. Animals suffer needlessly in labs. 338 possible violations of the AWA. That is only in one lab, there are 12,000 labs across the world. If you multiply that number by 338 youd get 4,056,000. 4 million 50 thousand violations of the AWA. There is a high probability that there are more since 2009. Is there no way that these animals could be treated like living, breathing, feeling beings instead of like a disposable tool to be thrown out after use.People speak sometimes about the "bestial"

cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel -Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Are we as humans using animals just for the sake of using animals? Is cruelty so ingrained in us that instead of doing logical processes, we use animals to hurt them? Is there a way to get people to realize that they can do something instead of just letting it happen?