Animal Testing

I agree that animal testing has provided valuable information in finding vaccines and saving thousands of lives. However, animals should not be the cost of us trying to find cures/vaccines for HUMAN diseases. Animals were not put on this earth to be poked and prodded with needles at the sake of scientific advancements. Some are here to be companions to humans while others are to roam among the wild. "Humans are the only hunters who kill when not hungry." -Steven Spielberg. Right this very moment there are chimps being tested for HIV, but ironically enough, they can't acquire HIV. There is only one monkey who has ever died from AIDS, Jerom, and it was only because he was injected with three different strains of the virus which ultimately created a hybrid strain. Some people argue that "animals don't have feelings," but just because they can't talk to tell you that they're in pain, doesn't mean that they aren't. Animals can become happy, sad, depressed, etc. In his final months that Jerom was alive, he became severely depressed and frustrated. His "keepers" say that they would see him sobbing quietly and would even curl up in a fetal position to comfort himself. Does that sound like an animal that doesn't have feelings? Rodents are almost always the ones used in research, however, rodents are only 37% effective in determining the cause of cancer in humans. Flipping a coin would be more accurate. 95% of drugs passed by animal tests are immediately discarded as useless or dangerous to humans. An example would be the drug Vioxx, a drug to treat arthritis. It was found to be safe in monkeys (and five other animal species) but has been estimated to have caused around 320,000 heart attacks/strokes and about 140,000 deaths worldwide. So not only did the drug cost thousands of animal lives, but nearly a half of a million humans were impacted, and not for the better. If scientists want to find a cure/vaccine for human diseases, they should use willing HUMANS to find it, not poor helpless animals. I know animals can't talk, but I guarantee that is they could, they would be begging for freedom, pleading to be let out of the cages and released into their natural habitat. Despite what you might think, there are alternatives to animal testing. One that is catching the eyes of pharmaceutical companies is a device called "organ-on-a-chip." It's a microchip lined with human cells through which air, nutrients, blood, and infection-causing bacteria could be pumped. They are meant to mimic the function of human organs, which will be a huge scientific advancement. Not only can it eradicate animals from being tested on, but it will provide more precise and accurate information as to what happens to the human body after being injected with a potential drug. It's more accurate because it's using human cells and not animal cells. No more playing the guessing game when it comes to determining what will happen to the human body when given a drug. This alternative costs a lot less and will take a couple days to a few weeks for results, opposed to the months-years it takes for testing animals. 1. "Cruelty Free International." Cruelty Free International. Publisher. n.d. Web. 19 November. 2015. 2. Burrell, Teal. "Can We Eliminate Animals from Medical Research?" PBS. PBS, 7 Aug. 2013. Web. 19 Feb. 2016. 3. Moxley, Angela. "The End of Animal Testing." The Humane Society of the United States, 2010.