69. IS EXPERIMENTING ON ANIMALS JUSTIFIED ? GIVE YOUR OPINION , by M.S (Bachilerato 2).

  SONG: Lisa Gerrard - The End

Experimenting on animals is an activity that has occurred since times of Ancient Greece. Aristotle was one of the first scientists who began this practise, which has kept developing over the years until the present. Nowadays, there are many laboratories that work with animals such as rats, birds or frogs (among others). After the experiment, most animals are sacrificed. The treatment of living animals for human benefit and its following sacrifice creates a lot of controversy. 

On the one hand, experimenting on animals has provided an incredibly great progress for science, especially for the field of medicine. Injecting different diseases or vaccines against those illnesses to animals has been useful to find their cure, and even to eradicate them. Without this kind of experiments, modern medicine wouldn’t exist nowadays, and humanity would still be suffering unnecessarily. Developments in medicine are fantastic, but scientists need something to test their vaccines on, and animals are the most similar organisms to us, human beings.

However, they are also used for marketing and military aims, and that isn’t justified. These animals are raised with selfish purposes. Their lives are spoilt in captivity, and they are treated abruptly by the scientists. After all the experimenting stage, which supposes lots of suffering for these creatures, they are killed. This goes against the ethics of many people, who criticise that animals are unnecessarily tortured in a cruel way, since there are alternatives to all this experimenting.

In my opinion, experimenting in medicine is completely necessary, and if it only works on animals, animals will have to be used for it, causing them the least suffering possible. Nevertheless, experimenting on animals just to make cosmetics which attract women or for military aims should be completely forbidden. The death of thousands of animals is not worthwhile at all: they feel, just like humans.

                                                           By M.S