Animal Testing Essay Research Paper Animal Testing

Animal Testing Essay, Research Paper Animal Testing Using animals for testing is wrong and should be banned. Theyhave rights just as we do. Twenty-four hours a day humans are usingdefenseless animals for cruel and most often useless tests. Theanimals have no way of fighting back. This is why there should be newlaws to protect them. These legislations also need to be enforced moreregularly. Too many criminals get away with murder. Although most labs are run by private companies, oftenexperiments are conducted by public organizations. The US government,Army and Air force in particular, has designed and carried out manyanimal experiments. The purposed experiments were engineered so thatmany animals would suffer and die without any certainty that thissuffering and death would

save a single life, or benefit humans inanyway at all; but the same can be said for tens of thousands of otherexperiments performed in the US each year. Limiting it to justexperiments done on beagles, the following might sock most people: Forinstance, at the Lovelace Foundation, Albuquerque, New Mexico,experimenters forced sixty-four beagles to inhale radioactive Strontium90 as part of a larger ^Fission Product Inhalation Program^ which beganin 1961 and has been paid for by the US Atomic Energy Commission. Inthis experiment Twenty-five of the dogs eventually died. One of thedeaths occurred during an epileptic seizure; another from a brainhemorrhage. Other dogs, before death, became feverish and anemic, losttheir appetites, and had hemorrhages. The experimenters in theirpublished

report, compared their results with that of other experimentsconducted at the University of Utah and the Argonne National Laboratoryin which beagles were injected with Strontium 90. They concluded thatthe dose needed to produce ^early death^ in fifty percent of the samplegroup differed from test to test because the dogs injected withStrontium 90 retain more of the radioactive substance than dogs forcedto inhale it. Also, at the University of Rochester School Of Medicinea group of experimenters put fifty beagles in wooden boxes andirradiated them with different levels of radiation by x-rays.Twenty-one of the dogs died within the first two weeks. Theexperimenters determined the dose at which fifty percent of the animalswill die with ninety-five percent confidence. The irritated

dogsvomited, had diarrhea, and lost their appetites. Later, theyhemorrhaged from the mouth, nose, and eyes. In their report, theexperimenters compared their experiment to others of the same naturethat each used around seven hundred dogs. The experimenters said thatthe injuries produced in their own experiment were ^Typical of thosedescribed for the dog^ (Singer 30). Similarly, experimenters for theUS Food and Drug Administration gave thirty beagles and thirty pigslarge amounts of Methoxychlor (a pesticide) in their food, seven days aweek for six months, ^In order to insure tissue damage^ (30). Withineight 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 minutebefore they passed out from lack of oxygen. Upon recovery from anepisode 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, theexperimenters concluded that massive daily doses of Methoxychlorproduce different effects in dogs from those produced in pigs. Thesethree examples should be enough to show that the Air force beagleexperiments were in no way exceptional. Note that all of theseexperiments, according to the experimenters^ own reports, obviouslycaused the animals to suffer considerably before dying. No steps weretaken to prevent this suffering, even