Reduction, Refinement, and Replacement

Beauty care products, medicine, household products, agricultural chemicals, pesticides and food. These are the items that we use after the scientists animal test it. These products are taking huge part in our daily lives. Because it is not confirmed if it is safe, we can’t use anything before we test it out to prevent from serious problems, and the tributes are the animals.

The reason why animal experiments are important is because our scientific knowledge and biology skills have improved by animal experiments. It’s true that lots of animals died during the testing but, without them, we might have had even bigger damage/disaster. Diseases is something that can destroy humans really fast, especially the deadly ones. The black death was so powerful that it killed 30%-50% of world’s population in the middle ages. To prevent this cause, humans created medicine and safe tested on animals. As we tested on the mice, we have created 12 anti-cancer drug which is working perfectly on humans now.

Testing on animals lets us to have this much knowledge and medicine. Not testing on animals means that we have to test it on humans. If we safety test a unknown medicine to humans, there are consequences of dying or failing the experiment on the first try because the medicines we have now has been through hundreds of test before it could be sold by a citizen in the pharmacy. Tomas A. Edison said Success comes with 99% of hard work and 1% of inspiration, which also means that genius’s like Tomas Edison goes through hundreds and thousands of failures. If we were banned to test our products to animals, who would want to risk their entire life for a test? I think not much, and that would have led us to undeveloped science which might have made our world full with unknown diseases.

Tests on animals are not only safety tests but to find out how the chemical effects on living creature. This test is based on the death rates, finding out how dangerous the chemical is. So this lethal dose test can’t be tested on human, if we are following the human rights. You might think it is so cruel to kill animals like that, even though the main parts of the world are taken by humans. That is why 3R principle was created. 3R stands for; Reduction, refinement and replacement. Reduction means to test on animals only the amount you need, refinement meaning you have to make it’s pain as less as possible and replacement which means to study or research for another method. I believe we are dealing with the promise. We calculate the amount before we start the experiment, inject a medicine(narcotic) to make the pain less, and to make something else to replace the animals like robots.

Like this, we are getting lots of information by experimenting with animals. Although we still have to remind ourselves that they live and think like us. I believe if our technology improves, there will be time that we can replace with robots in the experiment, and time to stop this experiment.