Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Artifact 2

Gale, Thomason. "Stem cells may replace animal testing." UPI NewsTrack (May 8, 2006): NA. Student Resource Center - Gold. Centennial High School. December 13, 2006. <http://find.galenet.com/ips/retrieve.do?subjectParam=Locale%2528en%252C%252C%2529%253AFQE%253D%2528su%252CNone%252C14%2529animal%2Btesting%2524&contentSet=IAC-Documents&sort=DateDescend&tabID=T004&sgCurrentPosition=0&subjectAction=DISPLAY_SUBJECTS&prodId=IPS&searchId=R1&currentPosition=9&userGroupName=elli29753&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&sgHitCountType=None&qrySerId=Locale%28en%2C%2C%29%3AFQE%3D%28ke%2CNone%2C14%29animal+testing%24&inPS=true&searchType=BasicSearchForm&displaySubject=&docId=A145495993&docType=IAC&contentSet=IAC-Documents#sourceCitation>.

Even though this article may be really short, it answered one of the questions I asked myself earlier. This question was that why can't people just find something else to test their experiments on other than animals? The article answers this question: "German researchers say stem-cell testing can be used to replace hundreds of thousands of experiments on animals. "

"Animal welfare activists say they are happy when animals' lives can be saved, regardless of the number, but they emphasize that widespread testing on animals still continues, the newspaper said."

The article does say that regardless of how many animal lives could be saved through using stem cells, widespread animal testing will still exist.

But even considering that, at least this shows that people are trying to find ways to avoid animal testing and still be able to do this testing.

I think people should do a lot of research about these stem cells, so that we can start using those more and more for experiments instead of doing these tests on animals.

Questions.
1. What exactly are these stem cells?
2. How come these stem cells can be used instead of animals?
3. If they can be used instead of animals, why doesn't everybody just test on that?

Wednesday, December 6, 2006

Artifact 1

Moore, Heather. "Joe Camel Isn't The Only Animal Who Smokes." SIRS Knowledge Source: Search Results. November 13, 2006. December 6, 2006. <http://sks.sirs.com/cgi-bin/hst-article-display?id=SMD1409-0-7604&artno=0000254578&type=ART&shfilter=U&key=&res=Y&ren=Y&gov=Y&lnk=Y&ic=Y>.

I just read the article, and after reading the article I was even more disgusted by animal testing than I was before. It seems like a lot of people are trying to stop animal testing, but businesses like tabacco industries seem to be able to work their way around it. The industries know what they are doing is killing animals, but they do research which they then use to try and prove that it's not as bad.

The article mentions how smokers know that they are hurting themselves by smoking as well as the people around them, but they don't realize that they are hurting animals around them as well.

Animal testing has cost "millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of animal lives." The experiments are so "inhumane and pointless that they have been illegal in Britian since 1997."

The paragraph that made me think the most, as well as make me feel sick to my stomach, was the following paragraph. "To further its goal of selling cigarettes, the tobacco industry has funded experimenters who have cut holes in beagles' throats and made them breathe concentrated cigarette smoke for a year. They've inserted electrodes into dogs' penises to measure the effect of cigarette smoke on their sexual performance. They've confined rhesus monkeys to chairs with head devices and exposed them to nicotine and caffeine to determine how these substances affect their breathing. Cigarette smoke has been pumped directly into the nostrils of rats and mice. Millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of animal lives have been wasted on experiments that are so inhumane and pointless that they have been illegal in Britain since 1997. " It made me sick reading how people could treat other living things like this, and I don't think that just because these living things are animals that it gives human beings the right to treat them this way.