Testing means the procedures performed on living beings for purposes of research in basic biology and diseases, to guarantee the effectiveness of new medicinal products, and testing the human health or environmental safety of consumer and industry products such as cosmetics, household cleaners, food additives, pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals. Humans have experimenting on animals more or less since 500 BC as there have been found descriptions of the dissection of live animals in ancient Greek writings.
The most common animal testing procedures nowadays:
Forced chemical exposure in toxicity testing, which can include oral feeding, inhalation, skin or injection into the abdomen, etc.
Exposure to drugs, chemicals or infectious disease at levels that cause illness, pain and distress, or sometimes death.
Genetic manipulation.
Ear-notching and tail-clipping for identification.
Short periods of physical restraint for observation or examination.
Prolonged periods of physical restraint.
Food and water deprivation, live without them.
Surgical procedures followed by recuperation.
Infliction of wounds, burns and other injuries to study healing.
Infliction of pain to study its physiology and treatment.
Behavioural experiments designed to cause distress, for example, electric shock or forced swimming.
Other manipulations to create “animal models” of human diseases.
Killing by carbon dioxide asphyxiation, neck-breaking, decapitation, or other means.
Some treatments being studied can have unpleasant, or even serious, side effects. Often these are temporary and end when the treatment is stopped. Others, however, can be permanent. Some side effects appear during treatment, and others may not show up until after the study is over. The risks depend on the treatment being studied and the health of the people participating in the trial. Many different species are used around the world, but the most common include mice, fish, rats, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, farm animals, birds, cats, dogs, mini-pigs, and non-human primates (monkeys, and in some countries, chimpanzees).
If the animals keep living by the end of the experiment it may be re-used. Humans also can be used in experimentation as research subjects but if the research subject is human it have to be a volunteer's body. Test potential treatments in human volunteers are done to see whether they should be approved for wider use in the general population. A treatment could be a drug, medical device, or biologic, such as a vaccine, blood product, or gene therapy. Potential treatments, however, must be studied in laboratory animals first to determine potential toxicity before they can be tried in people, so all the medicaments are proved in animals before come out on the market.
Only a small proportion of countries collect and publish data concerning their use of animals for testing and research, but it is estimated that more than 115 million animals—including mice, rats, birds, fish, rabbits, guinea pigs, farm animals, dogs, cats, and non-human primates—are used in laboratory experiments each year around the world. In European Union, more than 12 million animals are used each year, with France, Germany and the United Kingdom being the top three animal using countries.
Experimenting on animals would be acceptable:
suffering is minimised in all experiments
human benefits could not be obtained by using other methods
But in the other side, aniamls testing produces an ethical problem and it can't be accepted because:
it causes suffering to animals
the benefits to human beings are not proven
any benefits to human beings that animal testing does provide could be produced in other ways
in many cases do not correctly predict real-world human reactions. ( nine out of every 10 candidate medicines that appear safe and effective in animal studies fail when given to humans. )
risk the health and safety of human volunteers in clinical trials.