The time of year has come once again for your dog to get a vaccination shot. As the needle edges closer to your dog’s fur, their paws clench onto your skin, and it begins to flinch and whimper. When the shot is actually given, it barks out in pain. However, after a short while your dog returns to its cheerful, carefree self, right into the arms of its loving owner (you). Now imagine the scenario inside a testing laboratory, with monkeys and dogs, known as a man’s best friend, trapped in tiny cages, and much more animals as well. They are being constantly isolated from the outside world, can be injected with harmful chemicals to test the effects, or go through painful procedures that will ultimately lead to their breakdown and death. Is there a need to sacrifice so many animal lives, including such animals we call “pets” to evaluate medication or discover new ingredients? Despite the fact that we are intellectually superior to animals and can benefit from animal testing, animal testing is unethical and shouldn’t be used as a method for medical research because 100 million animals are killed each year in laboratories all over the world, the tests cause unnecessary physical and mental harm to the animals, and there is a lack of association between the test findings in relation to human health.
   

Every year, 100 million animals are acquired from their living environments, housed in cages, and are eventually killed through an endless variety of painful, inhumane procedures (“Animal Testing 101”). In the “name of medical research,” animals such as monkeys are housed in cages which tore “off their fingers on the jagged, broken, and rusted wires that protruded their cages,” resulting in three to nine fingers being extremely deformed or just plainly gone (Newkirk). This means that these animals used for medical research are not just evidently being locked up in barren cages, but in addition these cages are in terrible conditions, causing physical damage to them. They are trapped in shoebox sized cages, isolated from their fellow species’ members and the outside world, waiting to be tested on. Tests ranged from purposely making great apes go crazy to make them crush their own baby's skull to study child abuse, to pregnant rabbits being given cocaine to study maternal drug use (Newkirk). These ridiculous studies are harmful and cruel to the offsprings, and are evidence of animal abuse within the laboratories. Today, we all know cocaine as a deadly chemical. Do you know that cocaine along with other deadly chemicals are still being tested on animals purposely to watch its recurring effects? This is important to consider because the increasing amount of meaningless tests done to animals is just adding to the amount of deaths every year, yet at the same time is supplying us usually with inaccurate results.
   

Before ultimately ending their lives within the testing facilities, animals suffer through not just physical, but mental harm as well. These animals develop a fear for whenever a person walks past their cage. Animals “develop neurotic behaviors such incessantly spinning in circles, rocking back and forth and even pulling out their own hair and biting their own skin” (“Animal Testing 101”). This shows that animals mentally suffer by developing behaviors that causes harm to themselves. They are too worked up, stressed, and scared of the dark fate waiting ahead of them that they result to damaging their own hair/fur, and skin. How would you feel like, being trapped in a cage, limited to a tight space, knowing that there was a painful procedure waiting ahead? Some scientists claim that there is no harm whatsoever done to the animal, but the behaviors of the animals prove different.
   

Even though animal testing is supposed to produce results that benefit us humans, there is actually a lack of association between findings within the laboratory to actual human health. How can we trust that results found from animal testing will yield the same response in humans? Well, we shouldn’t. According to The Food & Drug Administration, 92% of experimental drugs that are proven to be safe and effective in animals fail to show the same results in human clinical trials (Erbe). Animal medical research failed to link heart disease to cholesterol, cancer to smoking, and side effects not predicted in animals showed with human use of medications. One specific example is when “surgeons thought they had perfected the procedure of radial keratotomies on rabbits, but it blinded the first humans” (Greek and Swingle Greek). This proves that animal testing is not essential for the purposes of medical research. Out of ALL the ridiculous tests we performed, only a small fraction resulted in beneficial results. These cruel procedures’ results don’t even show a relation to human health most of the time. Humans aren’t identical to animals, and animals aren’t identical to humans. Our genetic makeups are on a whole new level compared to animals, which means our response to particular chemicals and procedures will be different. Is it truly necessary to kill animals to test ingredients/chemicals in everyday products that leads to results we can’t even apply to the human population over 90% of the time? These tests are cruel and most of the time fail to yield accurate results.
   

The opposing side to animal testing argues that as humans, we are intellectually superior to animals species and have the right to benefit from testing on them. However, I completely agree with Garner when he claims, “...we are not prepared to sacrifice some members of our own species to benefit others, we are not permitted to do this to animals either” (Garner). This shows that humans are granted the right to give consent or to disagree to tests done to them, but animals aren’t. Since humans aren’t willing to be tested on, animals shouldn’t be used either. Animals being used merely based on the fact that humans dominate them in power is just messed up and makes us at fault for speciesism. Animals are already used for human benefit in ways such as providing food supply, clothing material, and ingredients for household products besides animal testing. Humans are exploiting animals in a large assortment of ways that goes against morals that animals deserve to be given within our society.
     

Our obligation as being intellectually superior to animals is to provide protection for them, not to waste their precious lives and lead to more deaths lost each year to what is said to be medical tests. These tests lead to a massive number of animals being poisoned, slaughtered, and suffered to death annually within laboratories across the United States. The merciless tests conducted on a variety of animals are heartless, and most of the time generate results useless to be applied to human health. Animals are not just objects that should be treated as machines. The scientific community needs to stop the irrelevant and inhumane use of animals within the laboratory, and instead switch to the huge database available for testing today that will produce more accurate data.