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Using animals for testing is wrong and should be banned. They have
rights just as we do. Twenty-four hours a day humans are using
defenseless animals for cruel and most often useless tests. The animals
have no way of fighting back. This is why there should be new laws to
protect them. These legislations also need to be enforced more
regularly. Too many criminals get away with murder.
Although most labs are run by private companies, often experiments
are conducted by public organizations. The US government, Army and Air
force in particular, has designed and carried out many animal
experiments. The purposed experiments were engineered so that many
animals would suffer and die without any certainty that this suffering
and death would save a single life, or benefit humans in anyway at all;
but the same can be said for tens of thousands of other experiments
performed in the US each year. Limiting it to just experiments done on
beagles, the following might sock most people: For instance, at the
Lovelace Foundation, Albuquerque, New Mexico, experimenters forced
sixty-four beagles to inhale radioactive Strontium 90 as part of a
larger 'Fission Product Inhalation Program' which began in 1961 and has
been paid for by the US Atomic Energy Commission. In this experiment
Twenty-five of the dogs eventually died. One of the deaths occurred
during an epileptic seizure; another from a brain hemorrhage. Other
dogs, before death, became feverish and anemic, lost their appetites,
and had hemorrhages.
The experimenters in their published report,
compared their results with that of other experiments conducted at the
University of Utah and the Argonne National Laboratory in which beagles
were injected with Strontium 90. They concluded that the dose needed to
produce 'early death' in fifty percent of the sample group differed
from test to test because the dogs injected with Strontium 90 retain
more of the radioactive substance than dogs forced to inhale it.
Also,
at the University of Rochester School Of Medicine a group of
experimenters put fifty beagles in wooden boxes and irradiated them
with different levels of radiation by x-rays. Twenty-one of the dogs
died within the first two weeks. The experimenters determined the dose
at which fifty percent of the animals will die with ninety-five percent
confidence. The irritated dogs vomited, had diarrhea, and lost their
appetites. Later, they hemorrhaged from the mouth, nose, and eyes. In
their report, the experimenters compared their experiment to others of
the same nature that each used around seven hundred dogs. The
experimenters said that the injuries produced in their own experiment
were 'Typical of those described for the dog' (Singer 30).
Similarly,
experimenters for the US Food and Drug Administration gave thirty
beagles and thirty pigs large amounts of Methoxychlor (a pesticide) in
their food, seven days a week for six months, 'In order to insure
tissue damage' (30). Within eight weeks, eleven dogs exhibited signs of
'abnormal behavior' including nervousness, salivation, muscle spasms,
and convolutions. Dogs in convultions breathed as rapidly as two
hundred times a minute before they passed out from lack of oxygen. Upon
recovery from an episode of convulsions and collapse, the dogs were
uncoordinated, apparently blind, and any stimulus such as dropping a
feeding pan, squirting water, or touching the animals initiated another
convulsion.
After further experimentation on an additional twenty
beagles, the experimenters concluded that massive daily doses of
Methoxychlor produce different effects in dogs from those produced in
pigs. These three examples should be enough to show that the Air force
beagle experiments were in no way exceptional. Note that all of these
experiments, according to the experimenters' own reports, obviously
caused the animals to suffer considerably before dying. No steps were
taken to prevent this suffering, even when it was clear that the
radiation or poison had made the animals extremely sick. Also, these
experiments are parts of series of similar experiments, repeated with
only minor variations, that are being carried out all over the country.
These experiments Do Not save human lives or improve them in any way. It was already known that Strontium 90 is unhealthy before the beagles
died; and the experimenters who poisoned dogs and pigs with
Methoxychlor knew beforehand that the large amounts they were feeding
the animals (amounts no human could ever consume) would cause damage.
In any case, as the differing results they obtained on pigs and dogs
make it clear, it is not possible to reach any firm conclusion about
the effects of a substance on humans from tests on other species. The
practice of experimenting on non-human animals as it exists today
throughout the world reveals the brutal consequences of speciesism
(Singer 29).
In this country everyone is supposed to be equal, but apparently some people just don't have to obey the law. That is, in
New York and some other states, licensed laboratories are immune from
ordinary anticruelty laws, and these places are often owned by state
universities, city hospitals, or even The United States Public Health
Service. It seems suspicious that some government run facilities could
be 'immune' from their own laws (Morse 19). In relation, 'No law
requires that cosmetics or household products be tested on animals.
Nevertheless, by six'o clock this evening, hundreds of animals will
have their eyes, skin, or gastrointestinal systems unnecessarily burned
or destroyed.
Many animals will suffer and die this year to produce
'new' versions of deodorant, hair spray, lipstick, nail polish, and
lots of other products' (Sequoia 27). Some of the largest cosmetics
companies use animals to test their products. These are just a couple
of the horrifying tests they use, namely, the Drazie Test. The Drazie
test is performed almost exclusively on albino rabbits. They are
preferred because they are docile, cheap, and their eyes do not shed
tears (so chemicals placed in them do not wash out). They are also the
test subject of choice because their eyes are clear, making it easier
to observe destruction of eye tissue; their corneal membranes are
extremely susceptible to injury. During each test the rabbits are
immobilized (usually in a 'stock', with only their heads protruding)
and a solid or liquid is placed in the lower lid of one eye of each
rabbit. These substances can range from mascara to aftershave to oven
cleaner. The rabbits' eyes remain clipped open. Anesthesia is almost
never administered. After that, the rabbits are examined at intervals
of one, twenty-four, forty-eight, seventy-two, and one hundred an
sixty-eight hours. Reactions, which may range from severe inflammation,
to clouding of the cornea, to ulceration and rupture of the eyeball,
are recorded by technicians. Some studies continue for a period of
weeks. No other attempt is made to treat the rabbits or to seek any
antidotes. The rabbits who survive the Drazie test may then be used as
subjects for skin-inflammation tests (27).
Another widely used
procedure is the LD-50. This is the abbreviation of the Lethal Dose 50
test. LD-50 is the lethal dose of something that will kill fifty
percent of all animals in a group of forty to two hundred. Most
commonly, animals are force-feed substances (which may be toothpaste,
shaving cream, drain cleaner, pesticides, or anything else they want to
test) through a stomach tube and observed for two weeks or until death.
Non-oral methods of administering the test include injection, forced
inhalation, or application to animals skin. Symptoms routinely include
tremors, convultions, vomiting, diarrhea, paralysis, or bleeding from
the eyes, nose, mouth. Animals that survive are destroyed (29).
Additionally, when one laboratory's research on animals establishes
something significant, scores of other labs repeat the experiment, and
more thousands of animals are needlessly tortured and killed (Morse 8).
Few labs buy their animal test subjects from legitimate pet stores
and the majority use illegal pet dealers. There are many stolen animal
dealers that house the animals before, during , and after testing.
These 'farms' most frequently hold animals between tests while the
animals recuperate, before facing another research ordeal. These so
called farms in question are mainly old barn-like buildings used as
hospitals and convalescent (recovery) wards are filthy, overcrowded
pens. At one farm in particular dogs with open chest wounds and badly
infected incisions, so weak that many could not stand, were the order
of the day. These dogs were 'recuperating' from open-heart and kidney
surgery. Secondly, a litter of two-day-old pups were found in a basket,
with no food provisions in sight (Morse 19). In every pen there were
dogs suffering from highly contagious diseases. An animal's road to a
lab is seldom a direct one. Whether he's stolen picked up as a stray,
or purchased, there's a de tour first to the animal dealer's farm;
There he waits- never under satisfactory conditions- until his ride,
and often life, comes to an end at the laboratory (23).
Every day of the year, hundreds of thousands of fully conscious
animals are scalded, or beaten, or crushed to death, and more are
subjected to exotic surgery and then allowed to die slowly and in
agony. There is no reason for this suffering to continue (Morse 8).
In conclusion, animal testing is inhumane and no animal should be forced to endure such torture. Waste in government is one thing;
it seems to be an accepted liability of democracy. But the wasting of
lives is something else. How did it ever get this way?
WORKS CITED
Fox, Michael Allen. The Case For Animal Experimentation. Los Angeles: University Of California Press, 1986.
Jasper, James M. And Dorothy Nelkin, eds. The Animal Rights Crusade. New York: Macmillion Inc., 1992, 103-56.
Morse, Mel. Ordeal Of The Animals. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall International, 1968.
Sequoia, Anna. 67 Ways To Save The Animals. New York: Harper Collins, 1990.
Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York: Random House, 1975.
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