This page focuses on the con arguments concerning animal testing. For the pro arguments, visit Group 6 - Animal Testing.

Animal studies are a controverse topic and although there are regulations many organizations still want to prevent them. Europe introducted in 2010 the Directive 2010/63/EU which make the three R's a firm legal requirement. [1]

• Replacement: introduce new methods, strategies or approaches that do no longer rely on animals e.g. in-vitro tissue
• Reduction: reducing that the amount of animals that is needed by maximising the information gain
• Refinement: decrease the pain and sufferings for animals, thus making them more comfortable and increase the quality of data.

And in fact animals used for studies are overall decreasing and moving from more "sentient" to those we consider less "sentient" not only in Europe but as well in the US which the following table depicts.

[Source]

However the amount of animals is still too high and often unecessary, therefore this chapter covers the contra points of animal studies. In the following, three main arguments against animal testing are presented.

Contra

Animal testing is cruel and inhumane

This is probably the first point that comes to mind when talking about animal studies. Is it ethical to test drugs and methods we would not try on ourselves on other human beings? For a example the commonly used LD50 (lethal dose 50) test involves finding out which dose of a chemical will kill 50% of the animals being used in the experiment [6]. An interesting point that was made by Andrew Knight in [8] was that researchers justify these tests by a utilitarian moral, that a sacrifice has to be made for the greater good. Yet most people would not approve these methods on themselves. In order to use this logic the moral standing of an animal must be extremely lower than that of people. But after reviewing several studies Andrew Knight came to the conclusion that there is enough scientific evidence for the existence of cognitive and related ability in animals as well as sufficient psychological characteristics to include the into moral consideration. Therefore many ways we use these animals are simply unethical and wrong.

Animal studies often do not benefit humans

A big problem with animal studies is that often the results can not be translated into humans. One issue is that animal studies are often poorly designed and conducted and not evaluated through systematic reviews as explained in [3] and [5]. For example a 2009 peer-reviewed study found that 87% of the publicly funded US and UK studies failed to randomize the selection of animals or that the studies use different drog doses and produce therefore not comparable results. Often if these studies show no good results the researchers fail to write a systematic review which is urgent by ensuring that animal experiments do not set out to answer questions that have already been answered. That is why reviews support the principle of reduction. In order to make animal studies more substantail improvement has to be made in the scientific methods as well as in more systematic reviews.

However even if the previous points are fulfilled an animal is almost in no way comparable to a human. 94% of drugs that pass animal tests fail in human clinical trials [6], after all we are not 70kg mice.Even worse a drug that passes animal studies can even be harmful to a human. The other way around can be considered as well. Researches might disregard a drug because it showed no promise in animal studies. The same drug however can be a breakthrough for human medication. Aspirin for example is harmful to some animal species, but helps millions of people to get through the day.

Animal studies are a waste of money

Considering the points in the previous paragraph one has to ask if all the money that goes into animal studies couldn't be spend better. There is no evidence that the few medical discoveries that were made via animal studies couldn't be achived with the same amount of money through other less harmful techniques. For comparison, a "rat uterotrophic assay" costs $29,600, while the corresponding in vitro test costs $7,200 and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) spends $14 billion of its $31 billion annual budget on animal research[6]. Maybe it is time to think about alternatives.

Conclusion

If you wish to also fight against animal studies, there are several non govermental organisations whom you can donate or even join with the biggest one bein PETA. For more Information visit their homepage. [9]

Bibliography

1. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/chemicals/lab_animals/3r/alternative_en.htm
2. https://speakingofresearch.com/2015/07/09/usda-publishes-2014-animal-research-statistics/
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC351856/
4. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/air/AnimalResearchFS06.pdf
5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746847/
6. http://animal-testing.procon.org/
7. https://futureofworking.com/12-advantages-and-disadvantages-of-animal-testing-on-cosmetics/
8. https://newint.org/blog/2011/07/07/animal-testing-costs-benefits/
9. http://www.peta.de/themen/Tierversuche