Brandon Zulueta

Ms. Batty
English 28
11/16/16
Animals Are People Too
Animal testing is experimenting on different types of animals like dogs, cats, mice,
monkeys, etc. for health research purposes. Most of the testing hurts animals and it violates their
rights. There are many articles talking about the topic of animals should be treated well or
stop animal testing. Scientists think that testing and experimenting on animals can provide
research on things like diseases that afflict animals and humans, new medicine, products, and
surgical techniques. There are good and bad opinions on using animals for testing to make new
drugs and medicines. Overall, I think there are a lot of medical research you could conduct
without the use of animals, even though animals are most likely the prime source for a lot of
stuff.
In the article Medical Research with Animals by the National Institutes of Health, it
talks about why scientists decided to do research on animals. They said that the research must be
relevant like us humans but experiment on animals. For example, dog research helped in the
discovering of insulin, mouse helped for rabies vaccine, pig helped for skin grafts for burn
victims. The article even talks about how they care or protect the animals which isnt entirely
true. Animals are abused when they are being experimented on. Animals and people are alike in
many ways; they both feel, think, behave, and experience pain. (lonestar.edu)

There are many reasons why animal testing is violating animals rights. An article from
the Animal Legal Defense Fund talks about the laboratories that are kept secretly of what they
do to animals. An estimate of 100 million animals are exploited in biomedical aeronautic,
automotive, military, agriculture and cognitive research. The worse part is that 95% of animals
are not protected by the law. There is also a video evidence that PETA put in their website
(peta.org) and it shows that scientists forcefully hurt animals with conductive tools and surgery
while the animal is in pain. Watching the video is most likely sad and disturbing because of how
the animals were treated in those labs in cages.
Scientists think it is more efficient to research on animals because it gives us the
ingredients for products. From the article The Experiment is on Us by Patt Dutt and Jonathan
Latham talks about how we use so many products like soft drinks, baby food, to paints,
gardening products, cosmetics and shampoos. Those items contain synthetic chemicals that were
based off of animal experiments. The results of these experiments challenge the longstanding
scientific presumption holding that animal experiments are of direct relevance to humans. Most
likely, our body will be built up to distinguish safe chemicals from unsafe ones.
There are many opinions of other people debating if animal testing is good or bad. After
reading some opinions online like (http://www.debate.org/opinions/), talking to friends and
family about it, the result is more likely that animal testing is bad. One anonymous person said,
No, its not right to kill and make them suffer for us. They suffer. If we just kill and make them
suffer, we are taking the freedom and the life of other animal. Making it clear, his message is
meaning that animals should have rights. Another anonymous said, I absolutely love animals
and feel that animal testing is horrible, however it has also given us huge medical advances that

we would have never came upon without animal testing. which is mostly true because, if
animals gave us medical advances, and if we dont do animal testing for something new, who
will?
What I think about animal testing is that it is bad. I think there are even more different
ways than animal testing to find advanced medical procedures or even ingredients for products.
A quote from the book called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks said, Though no law or
code of ethics required doctors to ask permission before taking tissue from a living patient, the
law made it very clear that performing an autopsy or removing tissue from the dead without
permission was illegal. But why is this not the same on animals? We do tissue removing or
autopsy when the animal is alive instead of dead. We also cant ask the animals permission to
remove something from the body because they dont even speak our human language. Because
animals cant talk to us, we shouldnt experiment on them.
In conclusion, animal testing is overall considered to be bad, even though it gave us lots
of stuff from research and experimenting. There is no argument that testing on animals gave us
so much medical advancements. We still dont know why it is that we have to hurt or even kill
animals for research. Most people think its bad and yet we use the stuff that they gave us
through animal research. Animals should have rights like us humans.
Works Cited
Dutt, Pat, and Jonathan Latham, PhD. The Experiment is on Us: Science of Animal Testing
Thrown into Doubt. Independent Science News Food Health and Agriculture Bioscience
News. N.p., 6 May 2013. Web. 10 Dec. 2016.
Save the Animals: Stop the Animal Testing. Save the Animals: Stop Animal Testing. N.p., n.d.

Web. 10 Dec. 2016.

Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown, 2010. Print.