Exploring Animal Testing – Advocacy, Challenges, and Fallacies

Different convictions and ideologies contribute to social issues, and at this current time and age, a significant social issue in the world that I am interested in learning more about is related to animal testing. Recently, members of society have opted to prevent animal cruelty in several ways, including avoiding the consumption of animal meat and animal experimentation, with advocates promoting animal protection and the reduction of animal cruelty.

National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS)

One organization advocating against animal testing is the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS). NAVS is a body that advocates for animals by arguing for the cessation of animal testing to end animal cruelty. Animal experimentation is a significant aspect of scientific research that contributes to creating therapies humans need for healthy status. Animal testing often results in desired developments in antibiotics, vaccines, hormones, and medical techniques (Fontana et al., 2020). The organization promotes using alternative methods in scientific research to protect animals.

The NAVS article, ‘Five Reasons to End Animal Testing’ (2017), gives several reasons to stop animal testing: first, the experiments consume a lot of time and are expensive. The second reason is the limitation of reproducibility in the experiments. Third, the limitation of experimentation to a given species does not encompass all other species, including humans, thus being unpredictable. Fourth, experimentation questions the ethics applied, and lastly, fifth, animal experimentation does not consider individual diversity in each human being (Five Reasons to End Animal Testing, 2017).

Given that NAVS lists the reasons to cease animal experimentation in their advocacy, it is essential to understand why it is an issue. According to Fontana et al. (2020), animal testing continues in animals despite advocacy against it due to the vitality of in vivo methods during preclinical developments. Also, the creation or application of alternatives to animal testing that offer all the five aspects addressed by NAVS, including predictability and reproducibility, is yet to be introduced on a large scale (Fontana et al., 2020). Accordingly, societal issues stem from the sentient trait of animals and the mental state of the people interacting with them, including their caretakers and the researchers themselves. Petetta & Ciccocioppo (2020) stipulate that animals do not face cruelty during research but that they are treated with care while interacting with caregivers who love working with animals; also, laws have been put in place to safeguard and protect the animals and the research, and as of 2015, there were an estimated 41.8 million animal experimentation procedures globally.

Informal Fallacies

Some of the anti-animal experimentation arguments are based on informal fallacies. Informal fallacies are the arguments made in the daily use of language in speech and written formats. Fallacies are arguments that appear correct but have a fault in reasoning. Several fallacy categories include deductive injunction, relevance, ambiguity, and presumptions (Copi et al., 2016). NAVS aims to end animal cruelty associated with the outdated practice of animal experimentation. Consistently, it suffices to say that their conclusion is animal experimentation is cruel. This conclusion makes it possible to point out the informal fallacies applied.

The first fallacy employed in their position is the appeal to emotions, which is a fallacy of relevance. In fallacies of relevance, the premises supporting arguments are logically irrelevant to the conclusion (Copi et al., 2016). The appeal to emotion, in this case, is the appeal to pity, whereby the person making an argument relies on the emotions of the audience or readers by evoking pity from them.

Premises: Animals are salient beings.