Use of animals for experiments are widely used to develop new medicines and to test the safety of other products. Many of these experiments cause pain to the animals involved or reduce their quality of life in other ways. It is morally wrong to cause animals to suffer when using them for an experiment. This produced serious moral problems. It has been agreed that it is wrong to use animals if alternative testing methods would produce equally valid results. Experimentation on animals can either be accepted or rejected. It can be only accepted if the experimentation on the animal has a minimized level of suffering on the animals and only if and only if human benefits are gained which could not be obtained by using other methods. On the other hand, experimentation on animals can be kicked against if it causes suffering to the animals, if the benefits to human beings are not proven and also if any benefits to human beings and animal testing could be produced in other ways. Animal research has had a vital role in many scientific and medical advances of the past century and continues to aid our understanding of various diseases. Throughout the world, people enjoy a better quality of life because of these advances, and the subsequent development of new medicines and treatments. All these are made possible by animal research. However, the use of animals in scientific and medical research has been a subject of heated debate for many years in the UK. Opponents to any kind of animal research, including both animal-rights extremists and anti-vivisectionist groups, believed that animal experimentation is cruel and unnecessary, regardless of its purpose or benefit. There is no middle ground for these groups; they want the immediate and total abolition of all animal research. If they succeed, it would have enormous and severe consequences for scientific research.
Different moralists has given different reasons as to why cruelty to animals is wrong. Animal experimentation to some extent has not been fully accepted because, whether the reason is an essential right of the animal, or a reflex bad effect upon the character of the human being, or whatever it be, cruelty and needless infliction of suffering upon any sentient creature, is unquestionably wrong. There is however, no ethical justification for the assumption that experimentation upon animals, is not cruel even if the animal is under the influence of anæsthetics. There is equally no moral justification for the statement that the relations of scientific men to animals should be under any laws or restrictions save those general ones which regulate the behaviour of all men so as to protect animals from cruelty. The moral principles relating to animal experimentation can be stated positively as follows:
1. Scientist are under definite obligation to experiment upon animals as long as that is the alternative to random and possibly harmful experimentation upon human beings, and if such experimentation is a means of saving human life and of increasing human vigor and efficiency.
2. The community at large is under definite obligations to see that physicians and scientist are not needlessly hampered in carrying on the inquiries necessary for an adequate performance of their important social office of sustaining human life and vigor.
Moral right of competent persons on animal experimentation in order to get knowledge and resources needed to eliminate useless and harmful experimentation upon human beings and take better care of their health was understated. This type of experiment is more than a right but rather a duty. When men have devoted themselves to the promotion of human health and vigor, they are under an obligation, to avail themselves of all the resources which will secure a more effective performance of their high office. This office is nothing more than the mere lessening of the physical pain endured by human beings when ill. Important as this is, there is something much worse than physical pain, just as there are better things than physical pleasures.
The person who is ill does not only suffer pain but is also rendered unfit to meet his ordinary social responsibilities. He is incapacitated for service to those about him and some of whom may be directly dependent upon him. Moreover, his removal from the sphere of social relations does not merely leave a blank where he was; it involves a wrench upon the sympathies and affections of others. The moral suffering thus caused is something that has no counterpart anywhere in the life of animals, whose joys and sufferings remain upon a physical plane. To cure disease, to prevent needless death, is thus a totally different matter, occupying an infinitely higher plane, from the mere palliation of physical pain. To cure disease and prevent death is to promote the fundamental conditions of social welfare. To secure the conditions requisite to an effective performance of all social activities, is to preserve human affections from the frightful waste and drain occasioned by the needless suffering and death of others with whom one is bound up. These things are so obvious that it almost seems necessary to apologize for mentioning them. But anyone who reads the literature or who hears the speeches directed against animal experimentation will recognize that the ethical basis of the agitation against it is due to ignoring these considerations. It is constantly assumed that the object of animal experimentation is a selfish willingness to inflict physical pain upon others simply to save physical pain to ourselves.
On the moral side, the whole question is argued as if it were merely a balancing of physical pain to human beings and to animals over against each other. If this is the case, majority would probably decide that the claims of human suffering take priority over that of animals. But a minority would doubtless voice the opposite view, and the issue would be inconclusive; anyway this is not the question. Instead of being the question of animal physical pain against human physical pain, it is the question of a certain amount of physical suffering to animals, reduced to some extent to a minimum by the administration of anæsthesia, asepsis, and skill; against the bonds and relations which hold people together in society, against the conditions of social vigor and vitality, against the deepest of shocks and interferences to human love and service. No one who has faced this issue can be in doubt as to where the moral right and wrong lie. To prefer the claims of the physical sensations of animals to the prevention of death and the cure of disease, probably the greatest sources of poverty, distress and inefficiency, certainly the greatest sources of moral suffering does not rise even to the level of sentimentalism. Scientists are given the right to use animal experimentation as an instrument in the promotion of social well-being, and at the same time, it is the duty of the general public to protect these men from attacks that hamper their work. It is the duty of the general public to sustain them in their endeavours. For physicians and scientist, they both have their individual shortcomings like the rest of us, though they are still acting as ministers and ambassadors of the public good.
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Animal experimentation has laws which regulates it. They are explained below:
The first law, written specifically to regulate animal experimentation was Great Britain's 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act. This act was a much weakened version of the original, extremely bill, which came close to passage in 1875. The 1876 law, which implicitly approved animal experimentation at the same time that it set up a system of licensing and certification, was replaced by the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act of 1986, which specifically states that "The Secretary of State shall not grant a project license until he is satisfied that the applicant has given adequate consideration to the feasibility of achieving the purpose of the programme to be specified in the license by means not involving the use of protected animals" (Animal Welfare, UFAW, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1992).
In the United States, the 1966 Animal Welfare Act, amended in 1970, 1976, 1986, 1989, and 1991, set standards for the transportation and husbandry of laboratory animals, excluding rats, mice, and birds. On January 8, 1992 the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC ruled that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had been violating the Animal Welfare Act by not enforcing its provisions as they relate to these animals. The U.S. Public Health Service Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals and the Health Research Extension Act of 1985 regulate all research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and require the submission of regular reports on protocols involving animals. The guide has been revised five times and is being updated once again this year. The NIH also requires accreditation by the American Association of Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC) or the operation of an institutional animal care and use committee. However, since AAALAC requires an animal care and use committee as well, almost all institutions conducting vertebrate research or testing are now subject to review.
References:
http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v8/n6/full/7400993.html, Accessed on 30th July, 2010.
J Messick, A Brief Examination of the Ethics of Animal Experimentation, Obtained from http://www.booksie.com/non-fiction/essay/jmessick/a-brief-examination-of-the-ethics-of-animal-experimentation, Accessed on 31st July, 2010.
Joanne Zurlo, Deborah Rudacille, And Alan M. Goldberg, Animals And Alternatives In Testing: History, Science, And Ethics http://caat.jhsph.edu/publications/animal_alternatives/chapter5.htm, Accessed on 1st August, 2010.
John Dewey, The Ethics of Animal Experimentation obtained from http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/animals/using/experiments_1.shtml,Accessed on 2nd August,2010.
