Animal Testing Essay Example for Free

Animal Testing Essay Living in the twenty-ï ¬ rst century society is beginning to raise questions about the importance and relevance of issues that could very easily alter our way of living. Animal testing is one of these issues; the use of non-human animals in experiments. When an opinion regarding whether or not animal testing is ethical is mentioned in conversation or our news, citizens generally begin to question its morality. In debates, the issues on animal testing should be divided into two sub-categories: what is necessary for survival, and what is moral. If animals do feel a little pain, can you imagine how they feel? They are forced to do something that they do not want to do just because they cant actually say ‘no’. Yet, scientists, the well educated people, believe that we should keep it, so should we really get rid of it? Animals used: Many different species of animals are used in research. In 2003, the majority of procedures used mice and rats. Other mammals accounted for around 3% of the total, including 11,000 pigs, 5000 dogs and 3000 primates (for example, monkeys and marmosets). Laboratory mice are used more often in research every year than any other animal species. Mice, and other rodents such as rats and hamsters, make up over 90% of the animals used in biomedical research. In addition to having bodies that work similar to humans and other animals, rodents are small in size, easy to handle, relatively inexpensive to buy and keep, and produce many offspring in a short period of time. However, rodents may not always be the best animal to use in certain experiments. In these cases, dogs, cats, rabbits, sheep, ï ¬ sh, birds, reptiles and amphibians, or other kinds of animals may be used. All of these animals together make up less than 10% of the animals used in research. Methods of testing the drug: 1.Exposure Testing Some animals are tested by exposure testing. Animals like rats, dogs, cats, monkeys and birds are exposed to things that people would normally be exposed to. Exposure includes inhaling cigarette smoke or being in a place where furniture polish is sprayed. Exposure to microwaves, UV lights, the sun and extremes in temperature are also ways animals are tested. The results found include diseases that show up because of exposure to elements, learning disabilities that might occur (based on maze and behavior tests after exposure) and pregnancy complications that go along with exposure. These tests are usually used to make conclusions about what a humans reaction would be to the speciï ¬ c substances or conditions that the animals were exposed to. Conclusions might be that products are safe for humans based on exposure to animals or that products and elements are not safe based on what happened to the animals. 2.Skin Testing Some products, like cosmetics, are tested on animals by skin testing. In this method of testing, animals have products applied to their skin. This is done especially with pigs. The products, like cosmetics and other skin care products, are introduced to the animals skin, and the results are recorded. Most of this testing is done by cosmetic companies themselves, who are looking for any adverse reactions the products might have. Reactions they are looking for include breakouts, skin irritations, sicknesses or allergies that crop up with exposure. Research companies might be paid by cosmetic companies to test the products of competitor companies to make sure that the products they are selling will perform better. Cosmetic companies and skin care companies are also looking to test how well their products work Skin testing on an animal http://www.peta.org/b/thepetafiles/archive/tags/skin against the claims they have made for their own +corrosion/default.aspx products. 3.Injection Testing Many animals are tested with injection testing. For drug testing, this might mean injecting an animal with a drug to see what the side effects of the drug might be. Allergy medications, acne medications, seizure medications and disease medications are tested on health animals to test for side effects like sicknesses, birth defects or behavior problems. Other animals are tested by ï ¬ rst being injected with a disease or a sickness, and then injected with a course of drugs to see which drug might beneï ¬ t it the most. Diseases include AIDS, Cancer, Parkinsons Diabetes and Epilepsy. The beneï ¬ ts they are looking for include a reduction in symptoms, a cure for the disease, or a way to slow down the diseases progress. Injection testing usually measures the effects of the substance that is being injected on the animals, in order to see what results those things might have Ingected animal testing for people. http://urchinmovement.com/ 2011/08/11/the-rise-of-the-planetof-the-apes-animal-testing-goesmainstream/ 2 Nayla Khalifa AlKhalifa 4.Creation Testing Some animals are created in order to be tested, or their creation itself is the test. Scientists play with the genetic makeup of animals and attempt to create new animals. They also perform experiments on animals in utero, such as inject them with drugs, expose them to chemicals and change their genetic makeup to see if these experiments can be accomplished successfully and then to see if those results can be repeated for humans. Animals are cloned in labs to see if the cloning process works and what drugs, processes and genetic manipulations affect cloning in what way. Cloned animals are then studied to determine the effects of cloning on a general population. 5.Behavior Testing Some animals are tested in a way that is unobtrusive. Behavior tests are not usually meant to test a product or cosmetic or drug. They are tests that look at the lives of the animals and their behaviors. Some tests might include testing the speed at which mice can run various mazes or testing an animals ability to recognize colors or symbols. These tests might include exposing animals to loud sounds like music or yelling or to stressful situations including loud sounds, ï ¬â€šashing lights or strange smells or vibrations. Researchers then watch their behavior and make conclusions about what might happen to people in the same situation. Behavior tests also include studying the way a dog thinks by having him respond to commands and stimuli or testing the way another animal reacts when praised or yelled at. These behavioral tests give more information about how animals think and how their brains work, and also provide insights into why humans might have some of the same behaviors or issues as animals. What are the alternatives? There is a huge range of non- animal research techniques that, as well as being a more humane approach to science, can also be cheaper, quicker and more effective. These include: ââ€" Cell cultures Almost every type of human cell can be grown in culture and this has been key to understanding cancers, sepsis, kidney disease and HIV/AIDS. Cells grown in test tubes are routinely used in chemical safety testing, vaccine production, medicines development and to diagnose disease. ââ€" Chemical methods Analytical techniques used by chemists can be used to detect toxins in products, such as the LCMS method to replace the use of mice who are injected to detect toxins in shellï ¬ sh. ââ€" Tissue and organ culture Tissues from humans donated after surgery or even death can be used to investigate diseases and also test whether drugs might be safe and effective, before they are used on humans. ââ€" Computer models Programs run on computers can be used to predict whether a chemical is going to be harmful based on its similarity to other chemicals, or to even simulate body processes such as heart rate. ââ€" Human Volunteers Studies of humans can often be the best way to replace animals. We can now see inside peoples’ brains using imaging machines or test microscopic amounts of new drugs harmlessly on volunteers, as well as conduct large scale studies of populations to help see what might cause disease (epidemiology). Scientists are moving away from using animals but it is a slow process and they need more support. My opinion on animal testing is that we still need it but we should try to minimize the amount of animals being used and the pain the may experience even when pain relievers and anesthetics are used. We should use alternatives as much as we need to. We should not completely ban animal testing until we have a full replacement for it that works just as well or even better. Scientist are actually just trying to save someones life, I think many people in this world would see that as a selï ¬â€šess act. Personally I would rather an animal die than a cancer patient. They also test on animals as some of them are very much like humans, that means if an animal has a positive reaction towards a drug we are one step closer to curing a disease and we would all rather an animal die during research than a human. Animals are mostly used to develop medicines for the sick and have they have actually helped ï ¬ nd different treatments for cancer, strokes, and may other diseases that many people die from each year. Anyone that thinks that they are against animal testing is basically telling some cancer patients that they would rather them die then some rats. I would never ban animal testing. I ï ¬ nd that the people who protest against animal testing are an insult to the poor people that are ï ¬ ghting for their lives lying in a hospital bed some where with one chance of getting their life back by taking a drug that may have been tested on animals. It makes me feel really uncomfortable knowing that healthy people want something which will drastically decrease the standard of living of others. A complete ban on animal testing will have very serious negative effects on medical research. I believe that developing better, more effective and safer drugs is more important than sparing a few rats. Either way, if we continue animal testing ( which we are now ) too many animals are getting hurt, money is being spent, and products are still being tested, but if we ban animal testing we only have alternatives that work with only certain parts of an animals body. So, if we do either one we will still have issues.

Procedural Democracy :: essays research papers

For a country to be truly democratic, it must practice procedural democracy and substantive democracy. A solid foundation and variety of different procedures is what makes a democracy work as it does for us today. There will always be problems with any system and there will always be someone complaining about how the government works. Without a doubt, we will never have a perfect government and we will probably never find one person without some sort of disagreement with the way things are run. But, a democracy is run off of compromises, and it will only work if the people are pleased with the progress that it has made. Democracy is supposed to be run by the people, but which people actually count. Many democracies don’t even allow the majority of their people vote. All democratic governments have some sort of regulations on who is allowed to vote. Even the United States of America, which we perceive to be one of the most democratic countries in the world, has regulations. If you are; too young, have ever been convicted of a felony, not a certified U.S. citizen, or are not mentally competent, you are not allowed to vote. This list has shrunk since the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendment though. Women, blacks, and even the poor have been discriminated upon to keep the people â€Å"we† want in the office. Slaves were even counted as only three-fifths of a vote at one time. It has been a hard fought battle by many people to get whom they think are the right people voting. What may be the most famous line of the Declaration of Independence states â€Å"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness†¦Ã¢â‚¬ . This line sets the tone for the rest of American life. It lets us know that there should be political equality and every live is as important as the next. It lets us know that one mans opinion is just as important as the other mans opinion. The majority will rule when it comes down to it, but minorities cannot be completely tossed away.

Nuclear threat

The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has become a metaphor for 21st-century security concerns. Although nuclear weapons have not been used since the end of World War II, their influence on international security affairs is pervasive, and possession of WMD remains an important divide in international politics today (Norris 61).The nuclear postures of the former Cold War rivals have evolved more slowly than the fast-breaking political developments of the decade or so that has elapsed since the former Soviet Union collapsed. Nevertheless, some important changes have already taken place. By mutual consent, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972 was terminated by the United States and Russia, which have agreed to modify their nuclear offensive force posture significantly through a large reduction in the number of deployed delivery systems.Nuclear weapons are no longer at the center of this bilateral relationship. Although the two nations are pursuing divergent d octrines for their residual nuclear weapons posture, neither approach poses a threat to the other. The structure, but not the detailed content, of the future U.S. nuclear posture was expressed in the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which established a significant doctrinal shift from deterrence to a more complex approach to addressing the problem of proliferated WMD.The Russian doctrinal adaptation to the post-Cold War security environment is somewhat more opaque. The government appears to be focused on developing and fielding low-yield weapons that are more suitable for tactical use, though the current building of new missiles and warheads may be associated with new strategic nuclear payloads as well. Despite the diminished post ­Cold War role of nuclear weapons in the United States, the cumulative deterioration of Russia's conventional military force since 1991 has actually made nuclear weapons more central to that government's defense policy.The end of the adversarial relati onship with the Soviet Union (and later, the Russian Federation) had to be taken into account in the NPR. The current nuclear posture is evolving in a manner parallel to the modernization of the U.S. non-nuclear military establishment. In stark contrast to Cold War ­era military planning, the 21st century is likely to be characterized by circumstances in which the adversary is not well known far in advance of a potential confrontation.The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is adjusting to these new circumstances by developing highly capable and flexible military forces that can adapt to the characteristics of adversaries as they appear. This makes the traditional path to modernization through investment in weapons systems as the threat emerges economically infeasible. Modern information technology lets the military change the characteristics of its flexible weapons and forces in much less time than it would take to develop whole new weapons systems. Thus, DOD is attempting to create a military information system: the integrated effect of command-control-communications-computation-intelligence-surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR). This system is inherently more flexible for adapting to changes in the threat environment.WMD and the means to deliver them are mature technologies, and knowledge of how to create such capabilities is widely distributed. Moreover, the relative cost of these capabilities declined sharply toward the end of the 20th century. Today, the poorest nations on earth (such as North Korea and Pakistan) have found WMD to be the most attractive course available to meet their security needs (Lieggi 2). Proliferation of WMD was stimulated as an unintended consequence of a U.S. failure to invest in technologies such as ballistic missile defense that could have dissuaded nations from investing in such weapons.The United States' preoccupation with deterring the Soviet Union incorporated the erroneous assumption that success in that arena would deter proliferation elsewhere (Barnaby 7). This mistake was compounded by the perverse interaction between defense policy and arms control in the 1990s. Misplaced confidence was lodged in a network of multilateral agreements and practices to prevent proliferation that contributed to obscuring rather than illuminating what was happening. Confidence placed in the inspection provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), for example, obscured efforts to obtain knowledge of clandestine WMD programs. NPT signatories were among those nations with clandestine WMD programs.Without a modernization of defense policy, the ready availability of WMD-related technology will converge with their declining relative cost and a fatally flawed arms control structure to stimulate further proliferation in the 21st century. The process whereby WMD and ballistic missile technology has proliferated among a group of nations that otherwise share no common interests are likely to become the template for 21st-century proliferation.The scope of this problem was recognized in part as a result of a comprehensive review of intelligence data in 1997 ­1998 by the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States (the Rumsfeld Commission). This recognition swiftly evolved into a set of significant policy initiatives that responded to changes in the international security environment. The arms control arrangements most closely identified with the adversarial relationship with the former Soviet Union were passà ©. In 1999 the Senate refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; the United States and Russia ended the 1972 ABM Treaty and agreed to jettison the START process, which kept nuclear deployments at Cold War levels in favor of much deeper reductions in offensive forces in 2002.U.S. policy began to evolve in response to these developments. The incompatibility between the Cold War legacy nuclear posture and the 21st-century security environment stimulated a search for approaches to modernize policies pertinent to nuclear weapons. In response to statutory direction, the Bush administration published the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Nuclear Posture Review, the National Defense Strategy of the United States, and the National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction. Taken together, these documents constitute the most profound change in U.S. policy related to nuclear weapons since the Eisenhower administration (Krepon1).  The unique capabilities of nuclear weapons may still be required in some circumstances, but the range of alternatives to them is much greater today. The evolution of technology has created an opportunity to move from a policy that deters through the threat of massive retaliation to one that can reasonably aspire to the more demanding aim–to dissuade. If adversary WMD systems can be held at risk through a combination of precision non-nuclear strike and active defense, nuclear weapons are less necessary (Albright 2). By developing a military capability that holds a proliferators’ entire WMD posture at risk rather than relying solely on the ability to deter the threat or use of WMD after they have been developed, produced, and deployed, the prospects for reducing the role of WMD in international politics are much improved.The 21st-century proliferation problem creates a set of targets significantly different from those that existed during the Cold War. Few targets can be held at risk only by nuclear weapons, but the ones that are appropriate may require different characteristics and, in many circumstances, different designs than those currently in the nuclear stockpile. The nature of the targets and the scope of the potential threat also alter the character of the underlying scientific, engineering, and industrial infrastructure that supports the nuclear weapons posture.   This research paper will therefore seek to discuss the problem of nuclear devices or WMDs (as they are presently termed) and try to address to current policy issues surrounding the matter.RESEARCH OUTLINE:INTRODUCTION:a.)    what is the problem surrounding nuclear threats in the 21st centuryb.)    what are the recent developments surrounding this issuec.)    what solutions have been successful in addressing these problemBODY:a.)    who are nuclear threatsb.)    what has been done to stopc.)    What can be done?d.)   What can the US do? What can the UN do?CONCLUSION:References:Robert Norris and Hans Kristensen, â€Å"Chinese Nuclear Forces, 2006,† Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 62. no. 3 (2006): 61.Stephanie Lieggi, Center for Nonproliferation Studies, â€Å"Going Beyond the Stir: the strategic realities of China's No First Use policy,† Nuclear Threat Initiative, http://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/realities-chinas-no-first-use-policy/ (accessed June 30, 2006).Frank Barnaby and Shaun Barnie, Thinking the Unthinkable: Japanese nuclear power and prolife ration in East Asia (Oxford, UK: Oxford Research Group and Citizens' Nuclear Information Center, 2005): 7†³8.George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.)Michael Krepon, Rodney W. Jones & Ziad Haider eds., â€Å"Escalation Control & the Nuclear Option in South Asia,† The Henry L. Stimson Center, September 2004, https://www.stimson.org/?id=191, (May 2005).Text of â€Å"Export Controls on Goods, Technologies, Material, and Equipment Related to Nuclear and Biological Weapons and their Delivery Systems Act, 2004,† Published in Gazette of Pakistan, 27 September 2004, Cited at, http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/ Infcircs/2004/infcirc636.pdf, (May 2005).Michael Krepon and Chris Gagne eds., â€Å"The Stability-Instability Paradox: Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Brinksmanship in South Asia,† The Henry L. Stimson Center, June 2001, https://www.stimson.org/research?ID=1, (May 2005).Feroz Hassan Khan, â€Å"The Independence-Dependence Paradox: Stability Dilemmas in South Asia,† Arms Control Association, October 2003, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2003_10/Khan_10, (May 2005).Ashley J. Tellis, India’s Emerging Nuclear Posture: Between Recessed Deterrent and Ready Arsenal, (Santa Monica: Rand, 2001.)

Cyber Bullying And Its Effects On Its Victims - 1651 Words

Society is constantly revolutionizing through technological advances that are creating, changing and shifting the individuals who live in it, especially cyber bullying. With the rise in the use of technology, digital culture and anonymity, cyber bullying has become a prominent issue that can have negative psychological effects on its victims through the power of these technological advances. This new 21st century term is derived from standard physical bullying has become a prominent and revolving issue as cellphone, texting and social media sites take away one’s privacy by causing harmful psychological effects on its victims (Siegel, 2012). With the advancement of technology, cyber bullying has becoming a prominent issue in society. The term cyber bullying is defined as using technology, like emails, social media and text messaging as a means to inflict psychological distress on another (Barlett, 2013) Since this is a new term derived from the old one; bullying, it is defined as either inflicting physical pain or social exclusion as a means of harming (Chibbaro, 2010). This new advancement known as the Internet has lead to the misuse of technology, which is seen in younger individuals who are unaware of the psychological distress they cause to one another (Barlett, 2013). This issue discussed by Siegel (2012) reports the excessive use as â€Å"the Internet is in the air they breathe, how they function in the world† (Siegel, 2012)†. These individuals turn to the Internet as aShow MoreRelatedBullying Effects900 Words   |  4 Pagesand Effects of Bullying Every year, approximately 7 percent of students report to being bullied (â€Å"Physical†). 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