Testing for potency was soon extended from biologicals to vaccines against infectious diseases. Gradually, the approaches developed for potency testing came to be applied to the safety assessment of chemicals and products that had been implicated in cases of human poisoning.
The debate over animal testing has become an ethical and philosophical issue. Many people argue that animal testing hurts the animals and is completely unethical because then we don't see the animals as having any rights. Some animal rights theorists argue that any creature that feels pain is equal to another that feels pain, humans included. Peter Singer, a professor of ethics at Princeton University, is often considered the Father of the animal rights movement, says in his book Animal Liberation, "If humans have basic rights, such as rights to be spared unnecessary suffering, then animals have those rights, too, the fact that a being is not a member of our species has nothing to do with how much its pain matters" (89).
Many families all over the world have a number of varieties of pets. Ask any of them and they would tell you that those animals are considered family members. I own two dogs myself. They are beautiful golden retriever males named Wylie and Tyson. Although they are just dogs, they have become an integral part of my family and our lives. They are personable and loving like any other family member and I consider them to be like brothers.
Animal testing, although prevalent in the United States, is not always effective in its results. Animals not only react differently than humans to different drugs, vaccines, and experiments, they also react differently from one another. Ignoring this difference has been and continues to be very costly to human health. Even though pharmaceuticals are routinely tested on animals, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported, "that 100,000 people every year are killed by prescription drugs and more than 2 million are hospitalized as a result of prescription drugs.