Animal Testing
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 private companies run most
labs, 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.
Bibliography
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.