Animal Testing

4 Minute Speech against animal testing

We should stop the use of animals for research and testing purposes. Animal research/testing refers to the use of non-human animals for testing or experimenting on. The use of animals for testing is used in the fields of: Biomedical research, security, evaluation, and education of a product. Every year animals are subject to experiments so painful and damaging that no one would ever do them on humans. Deciding whether or not to do animal testing is a tough choice which no one should have to make. We feel that animal testing is harmful, cruel, and unnecessary. We should look at how animals are treated in research and we should work to minimize or eliminate the number of animals who have to suffer through this procedure. Most research stated about 90% of research conducted on animals is performed on mice and rats. It is estimated that 50% of animals tested on annually are killed. This is supposed to be done to make the product safer for the humans and they are simply killing these animals. Researchers estimate animals used in research at well over 100 million. However, no one knows how many animals are used in the United States today because Animal Welfare Act, the legislation requiring the counting of animals in laboratories, excludes mice and rats; indisputably they are the most used animals in the industry. A staggering 100 million mice are estimated to be used in U.S. laboratories alone. Guinea pigs, mice, rats, rabbits, fish, and dogs are the most often used along with cats, primates, pigs, sheep, ferrets, and birds.

Imagine living locked inside a closet without control over any aspect of your life. You can't choose when and what you eat, how you will spend your time, whether or not you will have a partner and children, and if you do, who that partner will be. You can't even decide when the lights go on and off. Think about spending your entire life like this, even though you have committed no crime. This is life in a laboratory for animals. It is deprivation, isolation, and misery.

Now consider all the specialized needs of the species imprisoned for experimentation. Chimpanzees, in their natural homes, are never separated from their families and troops. They spend hours together every day, grooming each other and making soft nests for sleeping each night. They are loving and protective parents and baby chimps will live close to their mothers for many years. But in a laboratory, chimpanzees are caged alone. There are no families, no companions, no grooming, and no nests. There are only cold, hard steel bars and loneliness that goes on for so many years that most chimpanzees sink into depression, eventually losing their minds. Rats and mice are denied a place to dig and hide. Dogs and cats are deprived of exercise, affection, and the homes that they long for with families to care for them. Rabbits have no room to leap. Even when the cages are clean-and this is not always the case-the animals are not allowed to engage in any normal behavior.

On top of the deprivation, there are the experiments. Animals are infected with diseases that they would never normally contract-tiny mice grow tumors as large as their own bodies, kittens are purposely blinded, rats are made to suffer seizures. Experimenters force-feed chemicals to animals, conduct repeated surgeries on them, implant wires in their brains, crush their spines, and much more. Think of what it would be like to endure this and then be dumped back into a cage, usually without any painkillers Much of the experimentation-including pumping chemicals into rats' stomachs, hacking muscle tissue from dogs' thighs, and putting baby monkeys in isolation chambers far from their mothers-is paid for by you, the American taxpayer and consumer.

Many government programs are in place