Animals In Psychological Research
Animals In Psychological ResearchAn increasing number of researchers, scientists and practitioners are questioning the use of animals in research on ethical, moral, socio-political and scientific grounds. Use of animal research data to affect change in their patients is rarely used by clinical psychologists. This is certainly a public interest issue as it involves an enormous amount of brutality. Animal research is a very lucrative business, since billions of tax dollars are invested in it annually. An enormous amount of this money going towards researcher’s salaries, overhead costs, animal husbandry expansion and building maintenance. These billions of dollars can be redirected to prevention, public health programs, treatment and clinical research. There are too many missed opportunities for advancement in psychology due to money spent on theoretical, repetitive and exploitative animal research. In our society we have come to see that animal research is an easy way to stay alive in the “publish or perish” world of academia. Nearly anything can be proven using animals as test subjects which is evident in the way that the tobacco industry still claims that their research proves that cigarettes do not cause cancer. (Linder, 1998).
In spite of the fact that animal experimentation can be traced back as far as Galen (ca. 100 AD), its significance in consumer safety and medical research and is a relatively recent phenomenon. In 1865, Claude Bernard published his “introduction to the study of experimental medicine”, which marked the beginning of animal experimentation as a scientific method of research. (Menache, 1998).
The industry has always been quick to exploit the less than conclusive results of animal tests, especially in fields such as onconlogy. Consequently, the drug saccharin remains on sale to the public because it appears to cause bladder cancer only in male rats. The ingestible contraceptive drug Depo-Provera was banned in the United States over twenty years ago on the basis that is caused cancer in baboons and dogs. However, The Food and Drug Administration and The American Health Regulatory Authority recently reinstated the drug because twenty years of human experience in those countries, which did not prohibit its use, had convinced the Food and Drug Administration that Depo-Provera did not cause cancer in humans. Another example that is even more bizarre is the drug Tamoxifin, which is used to treat human breast cancer. Even though Tamoxifin reduces the incidence of mammary cancer in rodents, it actually increases the presence of liver cancer in rodents, and appears to be also toxic to the kidney (Menache, 1998).
Due to the unavoidable biological differences between human beings and animals, the results of animal tests can’t be applied to human beings with any degree of confidence. At the 1989 scientific workshop held at the Ciba Foundation past scientific director of Huntington Research Center (U.K.) stated that the best guess for the correlation of extreme reactions in man and...
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