Experimenting on Animals
Animal testing is a highly controversial issue unique to modern science. On one hand, knowledge gained from animal studies has spread into nearly every corner of medical research. Animal testing has lead to the development of numerous antibiotics and vaccines. Animals also play a central role in toxicity testing. New medical procedures also come from organ transplants from animals which saves lives. Given that many experimental tests cannot be performed ethically in humans, animals provide physiologies sufficiently close to make such experiments possible.
On the other hand, opponents sometimes claim that animals occupy a moral importance near that of humans, thereby making testing no more ethical in animals than in people. Opponents also criticize that the differences in biology among species show that substances may appear safe in common test animals but are dangerous in humans, and vice versa. Alternatives to animal tests exist in many cases---autopsies, epidemiological studies, and tissue cultures, for example. Furthermore, sometimes animals are kept in cramped quarters, and some tests inflict significant pain. Toxicity and other tests result in the death of large numbers of animals.
There are many shades of gray in this controversy. Animals range from insects to worms to mice to rabbits to dogs. The ability to apply the results to humans varies widely in this progression, with the animals "closer" to humans generally providing more reliable results. However, many people believe that the moral importance of the animals range from cosmetics testing to vaccine testing to toxicity testing to organ transplants. Sometimes alternatives to animal tests are readily available, sometimes not. The controversy is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
- What moral importance would you assign to animals compared with humans?
- What criteria would you use to judge the acceptability of a given animal test?
