Take a rough estimate of how many animals are killed each year in the United Sates in research alone? In nineteen-ninety-five, 1.5 millions animals (excluding rats, mice, and birds) were used in some sort of laboratory animal testing. (9) Reading the word "million- does not seem like a huge number, right? Well think about the amount of medication that is being prescribed to different individuals for different illnesses, like cancer or just the common cold. Medical research is not the only department using animals. Cosmetic research is also using animals to come up with different eye-shadows or lipstick so that we can cover up our age to look younger. So, how do animals become injected into the research picture? .
Dating back into the mid nineteen century, Louis Pasteur was one of many scientists that studied infectious diseases in domestic animals. (6) Louis Pasteur, a French Chemist, studied how contaminates caused alcoholic drinks to spoil; he was also convinced that microorganisms were also responsible for chicken cholera and anthrax. (6) As Louis Pasteur did further studies with rabbits and guinea pigs, he injected infectious diseases inside of animal's and then developed a vaccine that would fight against those certain disease, like anthrax and cholera. (6) Louis Pasteur was and is not the only scientist to infect animals and then develop vaccines for dozens of diseases. Many other scientists have developed vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, rabies, whooping cough, measles, mumps, rubella, tuberculosis, and poliomyelitis. (6) Many scientists that have developed some of theses vaccines relied heavily on animals for their experiments.
Another scientist named Ivan Pavlov, conducted a research on digestion on dogs. (5) Even though Ivan did not develop a cure or a vaccine he still conducted research on an animal, specifically a dog. Pavlov conducted research in the 1890's by surgically implanting tubes into the checks of dogs to study the reflexive secretion of saliva during eating.
