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Please Read This Warning Before You Use This Essay for Anything (It Might
Save Your Life) Animal Testing Using animals for testing is wrong and should be
banned. They have rights just as we do. Twenty-four hours a day humans are using
defenseless animals for cruel and most often useless tests. The animals have no
way of fighting back.
This is why there should be new laws to protect them. These
legislations also need to be enforced more regularly. Too many criminals get
away with murder. Although most labs are run by private companies, often
experiments are conducted by public organizations. The US government, Army and
Air force in particular, has designed and carried out many animal experiments.
The purposed experiments were engineered so that many animals would suffer
and die without any certainty that this suffering and death would save a single
life, or benefit humans in anyway at all; but the same can be said for tens of
thousands of other experiments performed in the US each year. Limiting it to
just experiments done on beagles, the following might sock most people:
For instance, at the Lovelace Foundation, Albuquerque, New Mexico,
experimenters forced sixty-four beagles to inhale radioactive Strontium 90 as
part of a larger ^Fission Product Inhalation Program^ which began in 1961 and
has been paid for by the US Atomic Energy Commission. In this experiment
Twenty-five of the dogs eventually died. One of the deaths occurred during an
epileptic seizure; another from a brain hemorrhage. Other dogs, before death,
became feverish and anemic, lost their appetites, and had hemorrhages.
The experimenters in their published report, compared their results with that
of other experiments conducted at the University of Utah and the Argonne
National Laboratory in which beagles were injected with Strontium 90. They
concluded that the dose needed to produce ^early death^ in fifty percent of the
sample group differed from test to test because the dogs injected with Strontium
90 retain more of the radioactive substance than dogs forced to inhale it. Also,
at the University of Rochester School Of Medicine a group of experimenters put
fifty beagles in wooden boxes and irradiated them with different levels of
radiation by x-rays.
Twenty-one of the dogs died within the first two weeks. The experimenters
determined the dose at which fifty percent of the animals will die with
ninety-five percent confidence. The irritated dogs vomited, had diarrhea, and
lost their appetites. Later, they hemorrhaged from the mouth, nose, and eyes. In
their report, the experimenters compared their experiment to others of the same
nature that each used around seven hundred dogs. The experimenters said that the
injuries produced in their own experiment were
^Typical of those described for the dog^ (Singer 30). Similarly,
experimenters for the US Food and Drug Administration gave thirty beagles and
thirty pigs large amounts of Methoxychlor (a pesticide) in their food, seven
days a week for six months, ^In order to insure tissue damage^ (30). Within
eight weeks, eleven dogs exhibited signs of ^abnormal behavior^ including
nervousness, salivation, muscle spasms, and convolutions.
Dogs in convultions breathed as rapidly as two hundred times a minute
before they passed out from lack of oxygen. Upon recovery from an episode of
convulsions and collapse, the dogs were uncoordinated, apparently blind, and any
stimulus such as dropping a feeding pan, squirting water, or touching the
animals initiated another convulsion.
After further experimentation on an additional twenty beagles, the
experimenters concluded that massive daily doses of Methoxychlor produce
different effects in dogs from those produced in pigs. These three examples
should be enough to show that the Air force beagle experiments were in no way
exceptional. Note that all of these experiments, according to the experimenters^
own reports, obviously caused the animals to suffer considerably before dying.
No steps were taken to prevent this suffering, even when it was clear that
the radiation or poison had made the animals extremely sick. Also, these
experiments are parts of series of similar experiments, repeated with only minor
variations, that are being carried out all over the country. These experiments
Do Not save human lives or improve them in any way.
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