The Ethics of Research on Animals

This essay starts out a little rough. But it is a good explanation of my feelings on this issue and the like, even if it could be more smoothly presented. What do you expect of a 16 year old? I feel pretty good about this essay, considering.

If given the choice of dying, or having a rat killed, most people would have the rat killed, rather than die themselves. If given a choice between having a chimp killed, and themselves being killed, most people would have the chimp killed. When it comes down to it, most people value their own life more than a non human's life.

Medical experiments on animals that involve life threatening conditions are really the same thing, if only on a different scale. There isn't as direct a connection, because there is no guarantee that the research will ever bring to light any new information. In addition, not everybody will come down with the condition that is being investigated, so it isn't as personal, but it still holds true that animal lives are being sacrificing for human lives. Still, in these types of cases animal research is a reasonable option to me. If this weren't such an emotional issue, I think that most people would understand that, while this sort of research may be unpleasant to think about, it is acceptable.

What about other types of research that don't involve life or death problems? When is it okay to harm, hurt, or kill an animal when the outcome of the experiment doesn't relate to saving human life? A very good example of this would be many psychology experiments. Because we want to understand behavior better, is it okay to deprive an animal of its natural life? Very often I think the answer is yes, if simply because being a research subject can have some advantages:

• Many of these animals would not have been born without the need for them in experiments.
• A life as an experiment subject doesn't have to be that bad, in some cases it can be much better than in nature, with no worry for things such as getting enough water and food, and no worry of predation and parasitism.

There are also reasons why being a research subject is less than desirable:

• Some experiments can expose subjects to unpleasant/harmful things that they would never have to deal with in natural life, such as electrical shocks, possibly harmful chemicals, and stress inducing things like loud noises and bright lights.
• While they may not have to worry about such things as food and predation (unless those are things that the experiment is trying to explore), they also lose out on living a natural, and much more varied life in the wild. Do we have the right to take this away from them when all we are seeking is better understanding of behavior? Remember that there is a good chance that they wouldn't have had this life anyway, if it weren't for the experiment. Also, most have no idea what they are missing since the majority are raised as experiment subjects for their whole life.

For many experiments, there really aren't any big ethical problems. The hard part is with the cases where severe harm, pain, and suffering are brought upon the animal. How important does the research need to be before it becomes ethical to perform the experiment? In my opinion, most animal research should be okay, but, emotionally, there are many types of experiments that I would rather not think of being performed.

It is very hard to decide where to draw the line when such emotional issues are involved. It would be a mistake to try to legislate something like this when the line between necessary and unnecessary is so hard to define that it can be hard to decide even on a case by case basis. The simplest, and perhaps the best, idea is to just hope that those who perform the experiments are just as human as you and I, and would not do an experiment that is truly cruel to animals for a project that is of little importance.