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In Korea, 41.4 million animals have reportedly been mobilized and victimized in animal experiments in 2019 according to the Animal and Plant Quarantine Agency. Animal experimentation has been a controversy for decades. While Korean public awareness of animal rights has heightened so far compared to the past, still under the circumstances, it needs to be reconsidered if animal experimentation is banned and how far the relevant law can be improved and changed.
To begin with, animal experimentation is cruel. Animals also have the rights to be treated against cruelty because all living existences should be respected based on the ethics of respect for life. American biologist and former professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, Marc Bekoff, who has pursued his research in animal behavior and behavioral ecology, argued that human beings should treat animals with care and respect because non-human animals exhibit thought processes similar to humans as well as emotions that could be compared to human emotions such as grief, fear, love, and compassion. Bekoff claimed, ' non-human animals are extremely smart and demonstrate emotional and moral intelligence.' As he has proved in his research, animals can feel the same emotions humans do, so animal experimentation can cause terrifying pain that animals can feel as much as humans. This means animal experiments can be cruel to animals, and they are completely against animal rights as well as the ethics of respect for life.
Furthermore, animal experiments are not accurate at an optimum level any longer when researchers and scientists in Korea use the results of the study and apply them to human cases. It is undeniable that human beings and animals have anatomical and biological similarities in their bodies, so the fact has lied at the root of justifying animal experimentation in history. However, the situation in science and medicine in Korea has changed over the past decades due to the rapid advancements in those areas. Scientific and medical technologies have become far more sophisticated than in the past, so the slight physical differences between humans and animals can affect the results more critically in experimentation.
Some scholars with opposing views claim that there are several reasons why animal experiments continuously should be carried out despite their detrimental effects. They argue that animal testing has proven itself to be effective and reliable in scientific experiments so far, also, animal experiments have generated tremendous life-saving medical advancements. In history, numerous infectious diseases, e.g., typhoid, diphtheria, measles, smallpox, etc., have been treated by vaccinations. Those vaccines would not be possible to be invented without animal experimentation because inventing new medications such as vaccines requires a great number of experimental living organisms. For that reason, among non-human existences, there is no other effective experimental subject except for animals. In this regard, the researchers on the opposite side assert that animal experimentation should be allowed in specific cases directly related to human health issues under strict conditions.
Granted, it may seem reasonable that animal testing may be allowed to a certain degree because of no adequate alternative to animals as experimental subjects. However, the argument cannot be accepted because several experimental alternatives have been developed. Owing to advancements in scientific technologies, non-animal testing methods have been invented. For example, researchers can use isolated human cells and tissues instead of living animals and they can also replace animals with computers and mathematics to model biological processes and expect the effects of chemicals and drugs. In addition, experts can conduct experiments on human volunteers and they can explore new advanced technologies such as robotics, molecular techniques, tissue engineering, and 'organs-on-microchips.' Some of the aforementioned methods have gained high credibility and excellent accuracy for common use. Therefore, animal experiments should be banned.
In summation, animal experimentation should be banned and the pending legislative bills on it should not be dismissed.
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