Background

• Animal experiments are widely used to develop new medicines and to test the safety of other products. Many of these experiments cause pain to the animals involved or reduce their quality of life in other ways.
• The ‘Three ‘R’s’ is a set of principles scientists are encouraged to follow to reduce the impact of research on animals. The three ‘R’s: Reduction (of the number of experiments), Refinement (of techniques to reduce suffering), and Replacement (cultures, simulations, or humans).
• Animal experiments are not used to show that drugs are safe and effective in human beings: that’s not something these experiments can show. Instead, they are used to help decide whether a particular drug should be tested on people.
• Moreover, a great deal of animal experimentation has been misleading and resulted in either withholding of drugs, sometimes for years, that were subsequently found to be highly beneficial to humans, or to the release and use of drugs that, though harmless to animals, have actually contributed to human suffering and death - Jane Goodall
• The issue of animal experiments is straightforward if we accept that animals have rights: if an experiment violates the rights of an animal, then it is morally wrong, because it is wrong to violate rights. The possible benefits to humanity of performing the experiment are completely irrelevant to the morality of the case, because rights should never be violated (except in obvious cases like self-defence).
• Some philosophers say that people who want to experiment on animals are caught in a double bind.

  · The animals must be sufficiently like human beings for the experiment to be useful

  · If the animals are sufficiently like human beings to be useful then it is unethical to treat them in a way that would be unethical if imposed on a human being

  · If the animals are insufficiently like human beings for the experiment to be useful then it is unethical to experiment on them because to do so is a pointless waste of the earth's resources
• Dolly 


  The first animal to be cloned from an adult mammal. In almost every way, she was identical to her ‘mother’.

  Wilmut hoped that for ethical reasons, humans would not be cloned, but that the technology he provided would be used for medical purposes. He hoped that hearts and kidneys, and even blood clotting factories would be created in order to help patients awaiting transplants.
• ‘Scientific procedures’ refers, for example, to using animals to develop drugs and medicines to treat human conditions and diseases; using animals as test-subjects for new therapies.