No one relishes using animals for experimentation, but the medical community has long insisted that such research helps develop potentially life-saving drugs and treatments. Is this justification compelling enough to continue using animals for medical research?
Animals used for experiments are routinely infected with diseases they would never normally contract, cut open, burned, starved, driven insane, poisoned, and killed—and it's all legal. The March of Dimes, a charity that funds animal studies, has paid experimenters to sew cats’ eyes shut for a year and then kill them; keep monkeys in restraints for days at a time; give ferrets and other animals severe brain damage; and addict rats and newborn opossums to alcohol, nicotine, and cocaine. In addition to the physical suffering—muscle pain, skeletal deformities, respiratory illnesses, and other chronic ailments—caused by intensive confinement, animals in laboratories are deprived of the companionship of others of their own kind, fresh air, freedom to run or climb, and the ability to make even the simplest choices about their lives. After months, years, and sometimes decades of being poked and prodded, they die or are killed—hardly an ethical way of treating another sentient being.
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