Throughout human scientific advancements, the usage of laboratory animals has increased tremendously. Every year millions of animals are utilized in research, sparking debates on the ethics behind the pain, distress, and even death of these animals in the pursuit of knowledge. Some of the most controversial testing upon animals is the introduction of drugs to the animals to identify its effectiveness on human related infectious diseases (Giacomotto & Ségalat, 2010). To combat against this ethical controversy, the scientific community has been searching for strategies to do away with the traditional animal testing methods. One widely recognized approach is the 3 Rs strategy (reduction, refinement, and replacement) which was developed in 1959 by Drs. William Russel and Rex Burch. The main focuses of this strategy are to decrease the number of animals being used in each experiment, create better environments and welfare for the animals, or to completely replace these animals with more ethical organisms such as prokaryotes or invertebrates (Doke & Dhawale, 2015). Overall, the goal of this strategy was to limit the usage of animals in the laboratory setting as there are great ethical concerns with the manipulations of animals for human scientific advancements.
In some perspectives there are arguments that animals cannot be put into the same moral perspective as humans because they don’t have full autonomy. To me this is complete nonsense because as creatures of the Earth we should all have mutual respect for each other. Although animal testing may be beneficial for human advancement, I question where we should draw the line between what is ethical and what is not. If lab animals such as rats can be experimented on and eventually killed, what is the difference in using an animal with a closer relation to humans such as a dog or cat? All things feel pain and stress, and therefore there must be a more advantageous and moral strategy to enhance human research.
Doke, S. K., & Dhawale, S. C. (2015). Alternatives to animal testing: A review. Saudi pharmaceutical journal : SPJ : the official publication of the Saudi Pharmaceutical Society, 23(3), 223–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsps.2013.11.002
Giacomotto, J. and Ségalat, L. (2010), High-throughput screening and small animal models, where are we?. British Journal of Pharmacology, 160: 204-216. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1476-5381.2010.00725.x
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