Argumentative essay: Animal Testing

495 Words2 Pages
While driving along the highway I noticed a billboard protesting animals be used in experimentation. If medical and scientifical experimentation were to be done in only human trials the knowledge and understanding of how drugs and procedures can affect humans would be decades behind. That is why the use of animals in experimentation is a must in order to continue advancing medicine and science. Animals have a high reproductive rate and are easy to breed. Animals have the same organs and tissues as humans do making them very good analogues. The animals that are used in experimentation are generally small and are easy to house and feed. When producing a new drug it is very hard to bring enough people, with the problem the drug is intended for, together to carry out a detailed trial. Animals however are very easy to breed and yield a high amount of offspring. A higher number of offspring allows for a greater number of experiments or trials to be performed at a time. The greater the number of trials that can be performed will increase the data that can be collected to increase the accuracy of the trial. If a drug was tested on humans and the first two people to take the drug died, chances are the drug would be discontinued and research shut down, even if the deaths were only coincidence. By having a larger sample size of animals one can test the effects to see how fatal the drug is and determine how it can be improved. Even though many experiments have expected results the effects of a drug could be wide spread. This is why using animals as an analogue for humans is advantageous. It allows one to observe the effects on living tissue under controlled circumstances in many subjects, and collect appropriate data so the margin of error can be made as small as possible. The ability to zone in on the effects a drug may have when moving into human trials
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