Animal Experiments

You need to learn the practical and ethical issues with animal experiments.

Ethical issues
Causes pain and fear - Some experiments on animals cause pain or fear. To remain ethical the experimenter has to make sure that only the lowest level of pain/fear is used. (minimizing pain) Coombes et al and Mineka et al are examples of two experiments where fear/pain was installed in the animals, but no major damage was caused.

Social isolation - Some experiments on animals require the animal to be kept alone. This could easily cause distress to some animals especially animals that are social (eg. dogs, monkeys and rats). To remain ethical this should be avoided.

Number of animals - It is often important to use several animals to be sure that the result is typical (reliability). However to remain ethical researchers still have to use as few animals as they can.

Choice of species - Different species of animal find different things distressing. So, for example, to avoid ethical issues with social isolation a less social animal should be chosen to study with. Jones used a rabbit which was an ethically good choice as rabbits are less afraid of humans.

Practical issues
Strengths of animal experiments:

- They are similar to humans: Animals and humans are similar, so the results can be generalised to humans

- They are simpler than humans: They are simpler to study, the results can be studies and scaled up for humans

- Deprivation: Animals are easier to control than humans, so they can be isolated to ensure that the variables under study are the only ones affecting them

Weaknesses of animal experiments: 

- Animals are different from humans: People can learn through a process called insight, where we have a problem that we can't solve immediately using information given in the scene. But animals usually can't do this. We are able to do things that animals can't such as using language, so we learn in more complex ways. This suggests that not all studies with animals can apply to humans.