Animal Research.

Every second of every day of every year, an animal dies in an experiment in the United States," reports Last Chance for Animals. All in the name of science. Scientists cut open live animals to see how their bodies work, they poison animals to see how their bodies react, they test cosmetics on them, and more. These animals often die excruciatingly painful deaths after having lived their entire lives in isolation, trapped in tiny cages with minimal stimuli.

On the other hand, millions of people would die each year from cancer, polio, diabetes, heart disease, and kidney failure if research on nonhuman animals hadn't been practiced since way back when. Animal research has been an important part of many biomedical breakthroughs, allowing scientists to test on animals countless possible cures for these illnesses.

Many people are unsure with which side of the argument they agree in regard to this issue, because millions of lives are lost either way. Although more animals die (and suffer much more before they die), humans are our species; if faced with the choice of saving a random animal or a random child, most people would save the child. They can relate more with children, knowing that children feel pain and distress, while it wasn't a commonly accepted fact until recently that animals have feelings as well.

Animals are used for research in several different ways: for education, for testing cosmetics, and for biomedical research. In regard to education, children all over the world dissect animals to learn their basic anatomy. It gives them a chance to see the different organs and their placement and to imagine what the creature's bodily systems were like when it was alive. It also leaves a more lasting impression than if the children merely study from a diagram. But it also leaves the impression that animal lives can be wasted if this benefits humanity. Millions of animals, mostly frogs, are killed every year expressly for educational use. Sometimes, in the act of removing thousands of a particular species from an area, the biosphere where they live is destroyed or dies because it is no longer supported by a specific species. This shows no respect for the lives of other species, only self-interest and the sense of self-gain.

Animals are used for product testing to make sure that a certain product can be safely marketed without the risk of causing serious injuries. From hair conditioner to pharmaceuticals, lab animals have products sprayed on them, put in their eyes, rubbed into their skin, or given to them to consume or inhale.

One commonly used procedure is the Draize Test, which is used to test household products for harmful chemicals. In the Draize Eye Irritancy Test, solutions are applied immediately to the subjects' eyes--usually a group of albino rabbits. This often causes intense pain and destroys the rabbits' eyes, leaving them raw and bleeding. After the test period (around seven hours), the rabbits are killed so they can be examined for internal damage.

Another standard test is the LD-50 (Lethal Dose 50 Percent) Test. This procedure is used to measure the toxicity of a substance--the amount of the substance it takes to kill half a group (generally 200) of test animals. The test usually goes on for days, and the animals suffer extreme pain and distress. When it's over, the animals remaining alive are killed. The Draize and LD-50 tests are only two of numerous types of product tests commonly administered to animals.

The use of animals for biomedical research is the most controversial of the three previously mentioned ways animals are used in research. The prevalent methodological use of animals in biomedical research is vivisection--the act of cutting into a creature still alive. This is done mainly to gain knowledge of how the bodily systems work and to examine how they react to various stresses and viruses. The numerous other experiments to which lab animals are subjected are sometimes placed under the heading of vivisection as well. These include: burning live animals (so that severely burned tissue may be examined); inflicting hard blows to the head, deep cuts, and other serious injuries to see how their bodies will react; injecting them with fatal viruses like HIV; poisoning them; and so forth. These experiments help scientists and physicians find treatments so humans will not have to suffer so much--so that thousands of children won't get polio, so that diabetes won't kill every person who acquires it, so that cancer can be treated and perhaps cured, so that a variety of illnesses may be fought.

The main problems with animal research are the validity of the test results, the expenditure, and the morality of it. The physiological difference between humans and animals exists--even with chimpanzees, our closest relatives--and consequently many test results come out incorrect. Innumerable people get seriously ill, develop liver or heart damage, because the prescribed drugs had unpredicted "side effects." According to physicians Neal D. Barnard and Stephen R. Kaufman:

   The U.S. General Accounting Office reviewed 198 of the 209 new drugs
   marketed between 1976 and 1985 and found that 52 percent had "serious
   postapproval risks" not predicted by animal test or limited human trials.
   These risks were defined by adverse reactions that could lead to
   hospitalization, disability, or death.

The mental state of the lab animals can also produce misleading results. If the animals are in a state of extreme distress from being trapped in tiny cages their whole lives with no stimuli and no room to move around, it can induce their various bodily systems to behave differently.

Animal research is quite expensive: $18 billion is spent annually by vivisection industries in the United States. Some of it funds research programs that actually accomplish something useful, but often enough this tax money is completely wasted on duplicated or pointless experiments. And even if an experiment does have a purpose, that much money doesn't generally have to be spent on it. For example, the National Institutes of Health spent:

* $1,329,332 on project PO1 HD2253900-01, conducted by Boston University, to demonstrate that malnourished rats bear offspring which are mentally retarded.

* $772,963 on project PO1 ES04766-08, conducted by Oregon State University, to test carcinogens in rainbow trout as possible indicators for humans, as well as testing current applications of human chemotherapy on rainbow trout.

* $969,475 on project R35 CA49751-10, conducted by Baylor College of Medicine, to stimulate glandular secretions in female rats in order to observe them engage in sexual activity. Instead, any extra money could be directed toward making the lives of the lab animals a little better by providing them with larger cages. In her book Through a Window, Jane Goodall said:

   When people complain about the cost of introducing humane living conditions
   [to the lab animals], my response is: "Look at your lifestyle, your house,
   your car, your clothes. Think of the administrative building in which you
   work, your salary, your expenses, the holidays you take. And, after
   thinking about those things, then tell me that we should begrudge the extra
   dollars spent in making a little less grim the lives of the animals used to
   reduce human suffering."

Too much money is wasted on pointless experiments while millions of people in the United States can't afford to go to the hospital, can't afford a good education, can't afford food and are malnourished, aren't able to do what they would like with their lives because they can't risk losing a job, and can't live happy lives because they are constantly worrying about money. Millions of people are under this kind of stress daily.

Finally, the morality of animal research must be addressed. The primary reason people have challenged the use of non human animals in scientific research is because of one question: do we have the right to cause other animals to suffer so that we don't? Many centuries of intense rivalry are behind this question.

Is it fair that we cause other beings intense pain and distress because we can? Lab animals live their lives in isolation. They usually have nothing to do except sit in their cages and stare at the walls, maybe rock back and forth to make it more interesting, day after day. Eventually, most animals will have reduced brain activity. They will be like lobotomy patients. On the day when something different happens--when they are injected with a fatal virus or taken out of their cage to be experimented upon--they are probably very bewildered. Something is going to change, the endless monotony of life is going to cease, but is it a welcome or unwelcome change?

Perhaps many of the animals would prefer to be dead, even if it meant going through excruciating pain--perhaps not. But they don't know what is happening to them when they are being experimented on; they don't know why this is happening to them. They only know that they are in extreme pain at the moment, and the moment is all that matters to them. And they know that humans are doing this to them--the same humans who have kept them isolated to live their entire lives in a monotonous vacuum.

There are alternatives to animal testing, but most scientists and physicians don't seriously consider using them instead of animals.

Animal research is morally wrong, but it has been useful in the past. So perhaps the answer is to take everything that was learned from past research and how the body functions and apply this to newer technologies like advanced computer simulations. We could accept the wrongs committed to animals in the past and turn them into rights, helping human lives without sacrificing animals.

We must remember what has happened in the past, like with the Nazis. They considered Jews to be beneath them--to be animals with no feelings--and so used them for experiments. Nazis justified their actions by saying that they were aiding the superior race and, besides, Jews didn't really count as anything important. That is exactly how most humans look upon other species today. But we don't think it is all right to treat other human beings this way, no matter what race, so how can we think it right to do the same thing to other species? Jane Goodall put it very well when she asked the question: "How can we, the citizens of civilized, Western countries, tolerate laboratories which--from the point of view of the inmates--are not unlike concentration camps?"

We must change that. Even if it takes time, we must change the fact that we are treating other species of beings that live on this planet as the Nazis treated the Jews during World War II. We must fight to get animals more humane treatment, and we must start using the quicker, easier, less expensive, and much more reliable alternatives to animal research.

Sarah Rose A. Miller is a fifteen-year-old student at Watershed High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This essay earned third place in the younger category of the 2000 Humanist Essay Contest Photographs have been added for editorial purposes.