Animal Experimentation Case Study

For the first part of my field research, I interviewed my neighbor. My neighbor used to work in a research laboratory and has encountered situations that show the problems with animal testing. She specializes in psychology and worked at a research facility that used animals for experiments in this field. When I was interviewing her, she spoke about the various experiments done on animals for psychology. The two main ones were maternal deprivation and addiction experiments. The maternal deprivation experiments involved isolating a rabbit from its mother during the early stages of life. The rabbit would be isolated from the mother after birth, and instead be placed with two fake mothers. These surrogate mothers are artificial and made of wire and cloth. One of the artificial mothers was created in such a way so that if the animal was to touch it, he or she would be shocked. This resulted in terror and discomfort for the baby rabbits as well as pain due to the shock. The other experiment that my neighbor did research on was about alcohol addiction. In this experiment, various animals are forced to consume large amounts of alcohol with a feeding tube. This test is done to gain knowledge on human dependence on alcohol. However, the amount of alcohol intake that the animals are exposed to led to organ damage and serious side effects. My neighbor found both of these experiments to be troubling and many of the people she worked with felt that the research did not benefit the field of human psychology as much as it hurt animals. The experiment was done because it was a requirement for the lab work, but still there were doubts from the researchers concerning the ethics. The scientific knowledge gained in these experiments was not adequate, according to the opinion of my neighbor and her colleagues. When I asked her how the overall experience with animal testing was, she said that it was something she would not want to return to because the experiments proved unnecessary and the animals were not treated with any consideration. There was also the point that animals are not reliable subjects when they are used to infer how humans would react to a situation. My neighbor said that the side effects or lack of side effects that an animal might experience cannot guarantee if a human would endure the same effects that the animal did. Reactions to situations vary from species to species, so it is difficult