Faculty of Chemical Sciences

Independent work: Five-Paragraph Essay

Jiménez Manzo Priscila Yamilet
4°B
ANIMAL TESTING, UNNECESARY?

We spend a lot of time with animals: our pets like dogs, cats, rabbits, etc.…They are, basically, part of our daily life. Unfortunately,
every year more than 115 million animals, are subjected to experimentation, where suffering practices are included, with the
supposed purpose of benefiting human beings. As point of departure, animal testing is wrong, archaic and unnecessary. Scientists
such as Dr. Christopher Austin, former director of the Center for Chemical Genomics at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), have
taken the first steps to change this type of practice. He says that traditional animal testing is expensive, time-consuming, uses a lot
of animals and from a scientific perspective the results do not necessarily translate to humans.

Firstly, as scientific advances grow, more and more animals are needed to experiment with them. Animal testing includes practices
such as toxic inhalation gases, corrosive chemical applications to the skin and eyes, HIV infection, or removal of part of the brain. It
is unethical to sentence lots of animals that think and feel in a laboratory cage for life only to deliberately cause pain, loneliness
and fear. For you, is it morally correct that millions of animals go through this just for, for example, a cosmetic product? And please,
think about all the scientist working on laboratories, would you kill an animal with your own hands?

Another important point is that not all the experiments performed with animals have biomedical purposes, that is, they do not
pursue to obtain advancements in human health. In some cases, these are tests for the environmental impact of chemical products,
in others, it involves safety testing of cosmetic or household products and there are even occasions where animals are used in
military research.

Thirdly, using animals is quite old-fashioned, therefore, a lot of scientists with innovative thinking have developed modern, humane
and effective animal-free research methods, including human microdosing, technologies in vitro, human simulators, and
sophisticated computer models, which are cheaper, faster, and more accurate than animal testing. It is true that it does not exist
alternative methods for everything, because of the complexity of the organisms, but it is also true that all the world does not
desperate need a new eyeliner, hand soap, food ingredient or pesticide at the expense of animals life. In addition, a perfect way to
reduce this is buying only the products that are cruelty free, which today, they are multiple of them.

To summarize, animal testing is a situation that makes you think of all the suffering of those who may be your own pets, which for
most people are family. Animal experiments it is inefficient, prolong the suffering of people awaiting effective cures by false
scientists and the waste of money, time and valuable resources that could have been used in relevant human research. We need to
change this, fortunately, we have many ways to avoid and reduce it and, perhaps in the future, with all the scientist advances,
eliminate it entirely.