Which Of The Following Is A Criticism Of Using Animals In Research?

Creature experimentation

A difficult event

In 1997 Dr Jay Vacanti and his team grew an ear on the dorsum of a mouse

Animal experiments are widely used to develop new medicines and to test the safety of other products.

Many of these experiments cause hurting to the animals involved or reduce their quality of life in other means.

If it is morally wrong to cause animals to suffer then experimenting on animals produces serious moral problems.

Animate being experimenters are very enlightened of this ethical problem and acknowledge that experiments should exist made as humane every bit possible.

They besides agree that it's wrong to use animals if alternative testing methods would produce equally valid results.

Two positions on animal experiments

• In favour of animal experiments:
• Experimenting on animals is adequate if (and only if):
  • suffering is minimised in all experiments
  • human benefits are gained which could not exist obtained past using other methods
• Against animal experiments:
• Experimenting on animals is e'er unacceptable because:
  • it causes suffering to animals
  • the benefits to man beings are non proven
  • any benefits to human being beings that animal testing does provide could be produced in other ways

Harm versus benefit

The case for fauna experiments is that they will produce such great benefits for humanity that it is morally adequate to harm a few animals.

The equivalent case confronting is that the level of suffering and the number of animals involved are both then high that the benefits to humanity don't provide moral justification.

The three Rs

The iii Rs are a set of principles that scientists are encouraged to follow in gild to reduce the impact of research on animals.

The three Rs are: Reduction, Refinement, Replacement.

• Reduction:
• Reducing the number of animals used in experiments by:
  • Improving experimental techniques
  • Improving techniques of data analysis
  • Sharing information with other researchers
• Refinement:
• Refining the experiment or the way the animals are cared for so as to reduce their suffering by:
  • Using less invasive techniques
  • Better medical care
  • Better living conditions
• Replacement:
• Replacing experiments on animals with alternative techniques such every bit:
  • Experimenting on cell cultures instead of whole animals
  • Using estimator models
  • Studying human volunteers
  • Using epidemiological studies

Drug safety

Animal experiments and drug safety

Scientists say that banning animal experiments would mean either

• an stop to testing new drugs or
• using human beings for all rubber tests

Creature experiments are not used to show that drugs are safe and effective in human being beings - they cannot practise that. Instead, they are used to help decide whether a item drug should be tested on people.

Animate being experiments eliminate some potential drugs every bit either ineffective or too dangerous to use on human beings. If a drug passes the beast exam it's then tested on a pocket-sized human being group before large calibration clinical trials.

The pharmacologist William D H Carey demonstrated the importance of animal testing in a letter of the alphabet to the British Medical Periodical:

Nosotros have 4 possible new drugs to cure HIV. Drug A killed all the rats, mice and dogs. Drug B killed all the dogs and rats. Drug C killed all the mice and rats. Drug D was taken by all the animals upwardly to huge doses with no ill effect. Question: Which of those drugs should we give to some healthy young man volunteers every bit the first dose to humans (all other things existence equal)?

To the undecided (and not-prejudiced) the answer is, of course, obvious. Information technology would too be obvious to a normal 12 twelvemonth onetime child...

An alternative, adequate respond would be, none of those drugs because even drug D could cause damage to humans. That is true, which is why Drug D would be given as a single, very small dose to human volunteers under tightly controlled and regulated atmospheric condition.

William DH Carey, BMJ 2002; 324: 236a

Are animal experiments useful?

Are animal experiments useful?

Fauna experiments only do good human beings if their results are valid and can be practical to human being beings.

Not all scientists are convinced that these tests are valid and useful.

...animals take not been as critical to the advancement of medicine as is typically claimed by proponents of animal experimentation.

Moreover, a bang-up bargain of animal experimentation has been misleading and resulted in either withholding of drugs, sometimes for years, that were subsequently constitute to be highly beneficial to humans, or to the release and utilize of drugs that, though harmless to animals, have actually contributed to human being suffering and death.

Jane Goodall 'Reason for Hope', 1999

The moral status of the experimenters

Animal rights extremists ofttimes portray those who experiment on animals every bit beingness and so cruel every bit to have forfeited whatever own moral continuing.

But the argument is most whether the experiments are morally right or incorrect. The full general moral character of the experimenter is irrelevant.

What is relevant is the upstanding approach of the experimenter to each experiment. John P Gluck has suggested that this is oft lacking:

The lack of ethical cocky-examination is common and generally involves the denial or abstention of animal suffering, resulting in the dehumanization of researchers and the upstanding degradation of their research subjects.

John P. Gluck; Ethics and Behavior, Vol. 1, 1991

Gluck offers this communication for people who may demand to experiment on animals:

The use of animals in enquiry should evolve out of a strong sense of ethical self-examination. Ethical self-examination involves a conscientious self-assay of one's own personal and scientific motives. Moreover, it requires a recognition of animal suffering and a satisfactory working through of that suffering in terms of one's ethical values.

John P. Gluck; Ethics and Behavior, Vol. 1, 1991

Animate being experiments and animal rights

The issue of brute experiments is straightforward if we accept that animals have rights: if an experiment violates the rights of an animal, then it is morally wrong, because it is wrong to violate rights.

The possible benefits to humanity of performing the experiment are completely irrelevant to the morality of the case, considering rights should never be violated (except in obvious cases like self-defence).

And as one philosopher has written, if this means that in that location are some things that humanity will never be able to learn, so be information technology.

This dour issue of deciding the morality of experimenting on animals on the basis of rights is probably why people ever justify animal experiments on consequentialist grounds; past showing that the benefits to humanity justify the suffering of the animals involved.

Justifying creature experiments

Those in favour of fauna experiments say that the good done to human beings outweighs the impairment done to animals.

This is a consequentialist argument, because information technology looks at the consequences of the actions nether consideration.

Information technology can't be used to defend all forms of experimentation since there are some forms of suffering that are probably impossible to justify fifty-fifty if the benefits are exceptionally valuable to humanity.

Ethical arithmetic

Brute experiments and ethical arithmetic

The consequentialist justification of animal experimentation can be demonstrated by comparing the moral consequences of doing or not doing an experiment.

This process can't be used in a mathematical way to assistance people decide ethical questions in exercise, but it does demonstrate the issues very clearly.

The bones arithmetics

If performing an experiment would crusade more damage than non performing it, and so information technology is ethically wrong to perform that experiment.

The impairment that will event from not doing the experiment is the result of multiplying three things together:

• the moral value of a human being being
• the number of human being beings who would have benefited
• the value of the do good that each homo won't get

The damage that the experiment volition cause is the result of multiplying together:

• the moral value of an experimental animal
• the number of animals suffering in the experiment
• the negative value of the harm done to each animal

Simply it isn't that simple considering:

• it's virtually impossible to assign a moral value to a beingness
• information technology'south well-nigh impossible to assign a value to the damage done to each individual
• the harm that volition exist done by the experiment is known beforehand, just the benefit is unknown
• the harm washed past the experiment is caused by an action, while the impairment resulting from not doing information technology is caused by an omission

Certain versus potential harm

In the theoretical sum in a higher place, the damage the experiment will do to animals is weighed confronting the harm done to humans past not doing the experiment.

Merely these are two conceptually dissimilar things.

• The impairment that will be done to the animals is certain to happen if the experiment is carried out
• The impairment done to human beings by not doing the experiment is unknown considering no-one knows how probable the experiment is to succeed or what benefits it might produce if it did succeed

And so the equation is completely useless as a manner of deciding whether information technology is ethically adequate to perform an experiment, because until the experiment is carried out, no-ane can know the value of the benefit that it produces.

And in that location'southward another factor missing from the equation, which is discussed in the side by side department.

Acts and omissions

The equation doesn't deal with the moral difference between acts and omissions.

Nearly ethicists think that nosotros have a greater moral responsibleness for the things nosotros do than for the things we neglect to do; i.east. that it is morally worse to practice damage by doing something than to exercise impairment past non doing something.

For instance: we think that the person who deliberately drowns a child has done something much more than wrong than the person who refuses to wade into a shallow puddle to rescue a drowning child.

In the animal experiment context, if the experiment takes place, the experimenter will carry out actions that damage the animals involved.

If the experiment does not take place the experimenter volition non do anything. This may crusade harm to man beings considering they won't benefit from a cure for their affliction because the cure won't be developed.

And then the acts and omissions statement could lead u.s.a. to say that

• it is morally worse for the experimenter to harm the animals by experimenting on them
• than it is to (potentially) damage some human being beings past non doing an experiment that might discover a cure for their disease.

And so if we want to proceed with the arithmetic that we started in the section above, nosotros demand to put an boosted, and different, cistron on each side of the equation to bargain with the dissimilar moral values of acts and omissions.

Other approaches

Other approaches to beast experiments

One writer suggests that we can cut out a lot of philosophising most creature experiments past using this examination:

...whenever experimenters merits that their experiments are important enough to justify the utilize of animals, we should ask them whether they would be prepared to use a brain-damaged human at a similar mental level to the animals they are planning to use.

Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, Avon, 1991

Sadly, there are a number of examples where researchers have been prepared to experiment on human beings in ways that should not take been permitted on animals.

And another philosopher suggests that it would anyway exist more constructive to inquiry on normal human beings:

Whatsoever benefits animal experimentation is thought to hold in store for us, those very aforementioned benefits could be obtained through experimenting on humans instead of animals. Indeed, given that issues exist because scientists must extrapolate from creature models to humans, one might think there are good scientific reasons for preferring homo subjects.

Justifying Creature Experimentation: The Starting Point, in Why Animal Experimentation Matters: The Use of Animals in Medical Research, 2001

If those human subjects were normal and able to requite free and informed consent to the experiment then this might not be morally objectionable.

Proposed EU directive

Proposed Eu directive

In November 2008 the European Matrimony put forward proposals to revise the directive for the protection of animals used in scientific experiments in line with the iii R principle of replacing, reducing and refining the use of animals in experiments. The proposals take three aims:

• to considerably improve the welfare of animals used in scientific procedures
• to ensure fair competition for manufacture
• to boost research activities in the European Marriage

The proposed directive covers all live not-man vertebrate animals intended for experiments plus sure other species likely to experience hurting, and also animals specifically bred and so that their organs or tissue tin can be used in scientific procedures.

The main changes proposed are:

• to arrive compulsory to carry out ethical reviews and require that experiments where animals are used be field of study to authorisation
• to widen the scope of the directive to include specific invertebrate species and foetuses in their terminal trimester of development and too larvae and other animals used in basic research, education and training to gear up minimum housing and intendance requirements
• to require that but animals of 2d or older generations be used, bailiwick to transitional periods, to avert taking animals from the wild and exhausting wild populations
• to state that alternatives to testing on animals must be used when available and that the number of animals used in projects exist reduced to a minimum
• to require fellow member states to improve the breeding, adaptation and care measures and methods used in procedures and so as to eliminate or reduce to a minimum any possible hurting, suffering, distress or lasting damage caused to animals

The proposal also introduces a ban on the use of great apes - chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans - in scientific procedures, other than in exceptional circumstances, but there is no proposal to phase out the employ of other non-human primates in the immediate foreseeable future.

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/animals/using/experiments_1.shtml

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