The Use of Animals in Scientific Research

That the animals play an indispensable purpose in scientific research is universally accepted. Their believe that having all created equally, we – humans – certainly do not hold any right to deprive the animals of their lives. 

Now the question arises, should then the animals be used for scientific research?

As of modern age, it cannot be debated that scientific research with the high demand for medicine and veterinary health is absolutely necessary and undeniable. The fact that animals play an indispensable role in scientific research is also universally acknowledged. The argument of the British Royal Society is that “virtually every medical achievement in the past century reliant on the use of animals in some way.” (The Royal Society 2004, p.1) which includes diabetes, heart surgery transplants and thereby researched the means and aims to enhance knowledge about how the organism behave, develop and function biologically. 

Well, should animals be used in research?

Animals are very important for enabling the scientists to gain more knowledge about human biology and health and inventing new medicines. For this purpose animals from the fruit fly to the mouse, have been abundantly used for scientific utility. 

Though, the use of animals for scientific research has become the heated argument for long. A section of people argue that animals should not be used in scientific research solely for the human goodness. The other section argues that if animals are eroded from the lab, it would minimize our understanding of health and disease and finally erode the improvement of new and major treatments. Though there are regulations which ensure that these researches be carried out in a humane way, these studies certainly do reduce the quality of life of these animals. In order to lessen the harm animals may come across while being studied in the laboratory, the researchers are supposed to follow a series of principles, the ‘Three Rs’. And they are as mentioned below: 

Reduce: 

By experimental techniques and sharing information with fellow researchers reduce the quantity of animals used so that the similar experiments are not being carried out  by many people. 

Refine:

By using minor invasive techniques wherever can be and enhancing the medical care and living conditions. This will refine the process the animals are cared for minimizing any stress or pain on them.

Replace: 

Use of other techniques like cell culture, computer modeling or human volunteers in place of animals replacing wherever possible experiments on animals for research purpose.

However, There are section of people who shuns the use of animals in the scientific research. Although use of animals by scientists as experiment media in their scientific research is very common phenomena. In Pharmacy industry,  the common practice is to use animals  as experiment media because the scientist has to be very sure that the new drug they discovered  is safe for human consumption. In this purpose animals are considered as a perfect experiment object as because they incur similar reaction as humans. Another vital reason for using animals as research object is that the research ethic code banns the scientist of using human for experiment purpose.

People against usage of animals as a research object argues: that genetically, primates are ideal animals which can be opted for testing new drugs. Rare population of pirates results scientists sing alternative animals for their research like mice, rabbits etc. Pragmatically, mice and rabbits possess other genetic structure which ought to result in bias result in the experiment causing invalidity safety on tested human new drugs.

The usage of animals in research purpose cause cruelty to them because most of them be injected more than ten times a day causing them to suffer and die slowly. The animal lovers’ association reports that some of these animals incur genetic mutation and some die tragically. 

Thus, to conclude we may say that in some cases usage of animals for scientific research derives benefit for the scientific development but occasionally, in reality, using animals for scientific purpose is needless which causes pain and hurt them.

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