My View on Animal Testing:
As an animal lover, I find it very hard to justify the act of keeping innocent animals locked in cages where they barely have enough room to turn around, keep them from their own kind and subject them to immense pain for our own benefit. However, I do realise that banning animal testing would be impossible and impractical. Those vaccines save lives on a regular basis and without them many more people in countries where infectious disease rates are high would die of horrible illnesses. My view is that instead of wasting millions of pounds on other irrelevant projects, governments and official bodies should spend that money more wisely and use it to develop research into finding alternatives to animal testing. Animals do not actually provide a very reliable base for a vaccine designed for humans as their cells do not react the same way as our cells. All ready there has been progress made to find alternatives and cells are being collected from human skin samples to be reprogrammed as other tissues so that vaccines can be performed on stem cells that are grown in a laboratory rather than on innocent lives. I think that at the moment animal testing is moving away from being justifiable as we start to develop technology to give substitutes and we, as a race should be trying harder to move away from animal testing as fast as we can.
As an animal lover, I find it very hard to justify the act of keeping innocent animals locked in cages where they barely have enough room to turn around, keep them from their own kind and subject them to immense pain for our own benefit. However, I do realise that banning animal testing would be impossible and impractical. Those vaccines save lives on a regular basis and without them many more people in countries where infectious disease rates are high would die of horrible illnesses. My view is that instead of wasting millions of pounds on other irrelevant projects, governments and official bodies should spend that money more wisely and use it to develop research into finding alternatives to animal testing. Animals do not actually provide a very reliable base for a vaccine designed for humans as their cells do not react the same way as our cells. All ready there has been progress made to find alternatives and cells are being collected from human skin samples to be reprogrammed as other tissues so that vaccines can be performed on stem cells that are grown in a laboratory rather than on innocent lives. I think that at the moment animal testing is moving away from being justifiable as we start to develop technology to give substitutes and we, as a race should be trying harder to move away from animal testing as fast as we can.