Animal testing does more good than harm.

Defense of Contention A.My opponent first points out that I used the source PETA to project how many animals are killed each year through animal testing. Well, my opponent fails to realize that many other sources agree that about the estimated number of animals killed through animal testing. (It's projected to be over 100 million.) These sources include Cruelty Free International, [1] Speaking of Research, [2] Humane Society International, [3] And Statistic Brain, [4], among others. My opponent then claims that animal research is highly regulated. Well, the amount of pain they go through says otherwise. "In research and testing, animals are subjected to experiments that can include everything from testing new drugs to infecting with diseases, poisoning for toxicity testing, burning skin, causing brain damage, implanting electrodes into the brain, maiming, blinding, and other painful and invasive procedures. It can include protocols that cause severe suffering, such as long-term social isolation, electric shocks, withholding of food and water, or repeated breeding and separating of infants from mothers. In toxicity testing, animals used in chronic toxicity and carcinogenicity studies receive the test substance daily, seven days a week, for up to two years with no recovery periods. Many, if not most, animals die before the end of the study. With the exception of chimpanzees, animals who survive their use in research and testing can be killed after the study is completed." [5] Note how it said that food and water can be withheld from the animals, which goes against a claim my opponent made. While it may appear to be well regulated from the Animal Welfare Act, actions speak louder than words. My opponent brings about the meat industry and how many lives it takes. This is one part I partially agree with. Yes, while the meat industry takes more lives than animal testing does, this doesn't excuse the deaths attributed to animal research. The death toll is still outrageously high whether you're comparing them to the meat industry or not. Defense of Contention B.In this argument, my opponent states that chimps make the best test subjects in animal research because we share 99% of DNA with them. Besides the fact that it's actually 98%, my opponent fails to take into account little differences."First of all, remember that we are talking about 6 billion letters of DNA here. The original 2% actually adds up to 12 million differences. Add on top of that another 28 million worth of missing and extra DNA and you start to get some serious differences even if it is only 5%!...Apparently a big part of what makes us different are differences in how we use these genes. Numerous studies have shown the same genes behave differently in chimps and humans. This means that a gene might, for example, be less active in humans or active at a different time or different location in the body." [6] Little differences like these can prove to be detrimental. Unless we have an exact equivalent or just a human step in, then we won't get the exact same results as we would with the other alternate subjects. My opponent claims that the examples I have were irrelevant, as they were over 60 years ago and about 20 years again respectively. When you research it, these are just small projections of animal research done today. "In fact, studies show that if you flipped a coin to guess how a human will respond to a certain drug, your prediction would actually be as accurate as if you tested the drug on a nonhuman animal. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the pharmaceutical industry all acknowledge this. The FDA reports that 92 percent of drugs approved for testing in humans fail to receive approval for human use. This failure rate has increased from 86 percent in 1985, in spite of all the “advances and refinements” intended to make animal tests more accurate. In addition, more than half of the few drugs approved are later withdrawn or relabeled due to serious or lethal adverse effects in humans." [7] My opponent then measures in the number of deaths from Thalidomide and Vioxx to cancer. First of all, this is an unfair comparison, as cancer has taken lives for thousands of years, while the medications I showed only had a short life on store shelves. Second, the number of deaths caused by animal testing far outweighs the deaths to cancer. I've already clarified that 100 million animals die from animal testing ever year, while 7.6 million die of cancer every year. [8] That doesn't mean that cancer isn't valid or that it isn't as important as animal testing, but you should be aware how much the rates of death to cancer are dwarfed by animal research. And here's why I should win the debate: for one, my opponent never gives specific citations to these sources, while I did. He could've easily just said it was research from, say, the American Cancer Society, when it could've been from a different source or there could be contradictions made in the articles that we'll never see, while I provided by sources so that every could see them. Secondly, I was able to defend against every one of my opponent's rebuttals. Thirdly, I've pointed out the inaccuracies in my opponent's information in both my rebuttals and my defense against his rebuttals. Thank you. Best of luck. So long and goodnight!Citations[1]https://www.crueltyfreeinternational.org...[2]https://speakingofresearch.com...[3]http://www.hsi.org...?referrer=https://www.google.com...[4]http://www.statisticbrain.com...[5]http://www.neavs.org...[6]http://genetics.thetech.org...[7]http://www.neavs.org...[8]http://www.worldcancerday.org...