Stop Animal Experimentation Essay

Submitted By ebauer05
Words: 1485
Pages: 6

Stop Animal Experimentation The debate for animal rights and stopping experimentation has been going on for decades Animal experimentation throughout the world has become a huge problem. Every year there are millions upon millions of animals used in an attempt to benefit human existence (HOPES). It’s not that I’m against a long life expectancy or having and allergic reaction is my favorite thing to have to deal with I’m just concerned with the well-being of another species. Peter singer is a philosopher from oxford that I will reference throughout this paper in an attempt to defend these innocent animals. There are so many issues surrounding the debate of animal experimentations, to bring up a few issues that lead to many, we can ask ourselves it is ethically and morally “right”, how can we be one hundred percent certain the tests performed on an animal will have the same effects on a human., after all we are not biologically, physically or mentally the same. When conducting an experiment we can only observe reactions to tests. The animal is not able to explain to us what they are experiencing. In my opinion animal experimentation is morally and ethically wrong. So many people want to argue that in order to stop animal experimentations we need to establish rights for animals I agree but I also think that if we could all just establish a good moral behavior towards animals, we would them be able to see how wrong the use of animals in experiments truly is thus hopefully dramatically dropping the numbers used each year in an attempt to hopefully one day end it all together. Last year alone in Britain and the United States over 3 million animals where used in experiments. The animals range from rodents to Gorillas. So I guess we could start by establishing a moral ground. In an attempt to figure out whether animal experimentation is morally right or wrong we could start by determining what moral grounds we have pertaining to animal. Animal ethics helps us when we venture down this train of thought it was designed to helps us to understand how animals and humans should react together .it is obviously hard to establish a moral ground that separates humans from animals. This leaves many people to argue on the simply basis that animals and humans are so obviously different that we have to treat them differently. But how are so obviously different from them? Is it because of our differences in shape, color, intelligence and personality? Or is on a deeper level, focusing on literacy, comprehension, pain or pleasure, or mental capacity? Let’s take a look at the comprehension aspect. Many people believe that animals are sentient creatures who feel pain pleasure and emotions. Most people can also come to the consciences that animals don’t need the same rights as humans; the need to vote, or have freedom of speech, but this should not stop us giving them a relevant form of protection. But there are some people who think that only creatures who comprehend rights can benefit from them, thus leaving animals out of the picture. But if this were the case then we would not give children and mentally disabled people rights because they cannot understand them. But as a society we do not hold these rights back, therefore we should do the same for animals (HOPES). Peter singer wrote a book called “Animal Liberation” that uses children and mentally disabled people as a defending argument as well. This book describes how using mental capacity to determine animal rights is discriminating. He uses the word specism, which is the discrimination on the grounds that a being belongs to a certain species. He believes that the interests of all beings that are capable of suffering should be worthy of equal consideration, and that giving lesser consideration to beings based on their species is no more justified than discrimination based on skin color.(Singer) In particular, he argues that while animals show lower intelligence than the average