Do animals have rights? The ethics surrounding the use of animals by humans.
Animals have a large number of uses, here are some examples; Pets: Cats, Dogs, Hamsters, and Parrots etc. Food: Chicken, Beef, Pork, Lamb etc. Food producer: Eggs, Milk, Butter, Cheese. Work: Police Dogs, Horse and Cart, Guide dogs for the blind. Sport: Show jumping, Greyhound races, racing pidgins. Medical reasons, test drugs on animals e.g. mice.
There are many arguments between the uses of animals by humans.
The leading arguments favouring animal research as such:
Certain compounds, be they food or pharmaceuticals, may have unpredicted effects that no amount of calculation or research is going to uncover. Thalidomide, in the 1960's, is a classic example. A sedative, Thalidomide made it through trials with no apparent problems. No-one, however, thought to test how this drug would work if used by woman who was pregnant. It turns out; the way it worked was that it produced amazingly bizarre, heartbreaking birth defects. The testing wasn't flawed. No-one had a clue this would happen. But clearly it did. Long term testing on primate subjects would have been horrible, but very well might have uncovered this defect before hundreds of human babies were born with dreadful and incapacitating defects, almost all quickly fatal.
The fact is, that when it comes to prepping a drug or vaccine or procedure for use on the human population, we either need to test it on animals with metabolic and eventually genetic similarities to humans, or we'll have to let it into production without testing.