Morgan Alexander

Ms. Coco
English 1001
15 November 2016
Audience: People that dont know much about it, but want to learn about animal testing.
Preface: Before writing this draft I was originally going to just focus on why we use animals for
testing. After doing research and putting them together, I realized I could put the articles into
two categories of challenges and benefits. I feel like focusing on that part is working well with
the flow of my paper. The thing that needs work is the organization, which is really what I plan
to focus more on of after I finish writing the entire paper. the reason I say the organization is
because I havent decided if I should go straight into the benefits since there arent a lot that I
found or if I should wait until after I talk about the challenges. The roadblocks that I faced is that
I might need to find at least one more article on the benefits because right now most of what I
have been finding is challenges. In the conference I want to focus on is how much I should focus
on the benefits since in my research I have found a lot more challenges than benefits.
Animal Testing
Many people forget animal testing is happening since its not glorified in the media
because its not a new topic. However, to animal rights activist it is a very big topic to which
they spend most of their time defending. Each side of animal testing have their own opinions on
the matter, but who is really right? While animal rights activist will say there are no benefits
and only challenges. The scientists doing the research will defend the tests saying there are
plenty of benefits. This has brought me to the question: Are there more challenges than benefits
of disease testing on animals?
Looking at the scientists view points one can see that animal testing has helped find
cures for not only humans, but also the animals being tested. Certain animals, but not all have
some of the same organs as humans do and react the same that humans would react. For
instance, Sebastian McBride and his colleagues started off using rodents as test subjects to test

for Huntington disease. However, since rodents do not have a long lifespan like humans do,
scientists were forced to switch to pigs and sheep because they have a lot longer lifespan (26).
The scientists did end up getting to observe the disease because it had time to develop like it does
in humans. They even discovered what else they needed to look for that causes the disease. Of
course the scientists thought that would be enough evidence to prove they needed to use animals
for the testing. Although this is a benefit of animal testing, some will argue that it is also a
challenge. The fact that they actually had to change the animals they were testing made it a
pretty big challenge because they had to start all the trials over again from scratch.
Animal testing is not just in the United States, there are many others that also use
animals like the United Kingdom. Pandora Pound and other professors from different
universities in the UK explain that there is not a lot of evidence that animal research actually
helps humans. The professors observed that most people are okay letting scientist test on
animals because they are on the assumption that it benefits humans. Since they couldnt find
much evidence on the research benefitting humans, the professors decided to do some research
for themselves. They ended up only finding 277 papers that could show some light on evidence,
but instead were only able to use 6 papers. What they found in doing this research was that the
scientists only really published the ones that helped humans and not the ones that didnt do
anything to help (4). The challenge in all of this is that it is difficult to carry this information to
humans because there could be other experiments that didnt work. People were then starting to
become hesitant in using animal for research all together.
According to Aysha Akhtar, More than 115 million animals are used worldwide in
experimentation or to supply the biomedical industry. From known knowledge, we dont get
that many cures for vaccines every year. I couldnt even tell you the last time scientists found a

cure for a disease. Just looking at this statistic, one should ask if we should still be using animals
for research or at least if we should be using that many animals. Despite what some may think
animals do have emotions and just like humans do and can feel pain that is being inflicted on
them from diseases. Those 115 million animals that were used and most likely died from the
tests could feel the pain the diseases caused them the entire time they were being tested. If
people dont believe that animals can have emotions, there are plenty of videos of animals crying
because they were in pain. The biggest challenge in all of this is the fact that we could be
morally wrong for putting animals through pain when they can feel what we feel.

What comes next:

1. Go back and read what I have already wrote and decide what order I should put my
paragraphs in.
2. Make sure everything makes sense and if not rewrite parts of the paper
3. Once finishing the paper deciding if I need to find more benefits or not and if I should
change paragraphs around.

Works Cited
Akhtar, A. "The Flaws And Human Harms Of Animal Experimentation." Cambridge Quarterly
Of Healthcare Ethics 24.4 (n.d.): 407-419. Science Citation Index. Web. 10 Nov. 2016.

McBride, Sebastian D., Nicholas Perentos, and A. Jennifer Morton. "Basic Neuroscience: A
Mobile, High-Throughput Semi-Automated System For Testing Cognition In Large NonPrimate Animal Models Of Huntington Disease." Journal Of Neuroscience Methods
265.Current Methods in Huntington's Disease Research (2016): 25-33. ScienceDirect.
Web. 10 Nov. 2016.

Pound, Pandora, et al. "Where is the evidence that animal research benefits humans?." BMJ:
British Medical Journal 2004: 514. JSTOR Journals. Web. 10 Nov. 2016.