Animal testing

If people oppose animal testing, they do not have to be hypocritical. The eating of another species occurs in the animal kingdom (carnivores or omnivores) and since humans are omnivores (1) it is completely natural for us to eat meat. However, it is not natural the way we raise animals to be slaughtered and I oppose that. I support free-range raising, I eat a reduced-meat diet and encourage my parents to buy less meat and organic products due to the environmental, health, and animal rights issues it leaves me not being a cause of. Therefore, I can not be hypocritical in debating animal testing. Now, animal testing has lead to scientific discoveries such as kidney transplants, drugs for asthma, cancer treatments and others, but, there are several major flaws in animal testing making it immoral, wrong and actually unnecessary. Animals bodies differ greatly from human bodies. Baboons are not humans, rabbits are not humans and rats are simply not human. No animal other than a human can provide accurate results in a test because they are not human and something that may be healthy to a rat may not be healthy to a human. The results of animal testing are not accurate. Rats, mice and birds are the test subjects of 80-95% of all experiments in animal testing and they aren't even of the same phylum as humans. How can scientists expect the results to apply to humans when the test subject is so drastically different?(2) Look at the Thalidomide tragedy of the 1960s and 1970s. Thalidomide came out on the German market late in the 1950s and had previously been safely tested on thousands of animals. It was marketed as a sedative for pregnant or breastfeeding mothers that supposedly caused no harm to either mother or child. Despite this "safety testing", over 10,000 children whose mothers had taken Thalidomide were born throughout the world with severe deformities.(3) The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that 100,000 people every year are killed and more than 2 million are hospitalized as a result of prescription drugs used as prescribed and that were tested on animals routinely. The tests done on animals for cancer research are actually not productive whatsoever. Animals do not get the same diseases as humans and so research is being done by artificially inducing "human" cancer on the animals. They will not react the same way as a human would and even if a treatment is developed, it might not even work on humans since we are so drastically different from other species. Animal testing for cancer has resulted in the loss of billions of dollars, countless animal lives and 30 years of wasted time on inaccurate and ineffective research.(3) What about Penicillin which kills cats and guinea pigs but has saved countless human lives? Arsenic which isn't poisonous to rats, mice or sheep but deadly to humans? Or Digitalis which dangerously raises blood pressure in dogs but continues to save countless cardiac patients by lowering heart rate? Animal testing contradicts all of these things.(3) The worst part is that there are so many alternative studies that are much more reliable, accurate, and safer. Methods that do not destroy life such as computer models, cell cultures, and even human studies. It is estimated that millions of animals die from testing unnecessarily and to a wasteful cause.(1) These alternatives would remove the suffering of another living, thing, reduce costs for testing, be more accurate and not cause millions of deaths in testing and then countless others from the inaccurate results. Animal testing is an unnecessary, inaccurate and wasteful testing method and it is immoral torture to animals. 1. http://www.biology-online.org... 2. http://www.peta.org... 3. http://www.whitecoatwelfare.org... http://www.youtube.com...