The Ethics of Animal Testing in Research
At Animal Free Research UK, we believe that experiments on animals are scientifically and ethically unjustifiable, and that pioneering animal free research provides the best chance of finding treatments for human diseases.
Whilst UK law enshrines the principles of the 3Rs – the replacement, reduction and refinement of the use of animals in research, we do not endorse the 3Rs. Instead, our focus is, and always has been solely on replacement – enabling scientists to stop using animals in medical research.
We only support and fund research that uses non-animal methods. We do not fund refinement or reduction research, or any research that uses animals or animal-derived biomaterials.
The Ethical Implications of and Problems with Animal Testing
There are many ethical implications in using animal testing to develop treatments for human disease. The most obvious ethical problem with animal testing is the suffering it causes to animals themselves.
Animal testing can cause immense pain and suffering to the animals involved. For example, testing and experimentation can include things like:
- Mice used to test the effect of viruses or substances via invasive brain surgery that implants devices, tubes and recording wires.
- Using tubes to administer test substances directly into the stomachs of dogs like Beagles.
- Deliberately inducing stress with methods including bright lights, cage tilting, intermittent air puffs, vibration and/or exposure to argon gas to test animal responses.
- Healthy mice, rats and chickens used to test “humane” killing methods.
Beyond the obvious ethical problem with causing pain, suffering and death in animals for the purposes of science and research, the other ethical implication of animal testing is how effective it actually is in developing treatments for human diseases.
Animal experiments account for a large proportion of medical research, yet we are no closer to curing many of the world’s most common and debilitating diseases, such as cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Many diseases are uniquely human, so using animals to study them often leads to misleading results.
Positive results in animal experiments have even led to unsafe treatments being tested in humans with devastating outcomes. Over 92% of drugs fail during human clinical trials, while Alzheimer’s disease drugs have a staggering 99.6% failure rate, despite promising results in animal tests. Animals like monkeys don’t naturally develop Alzheimer’s, or live long enough to study aging in the same way that humans experience it, so these outdated methods are simply not giving us the answers we need.
