Tests are conducted on a wide range of chemicals and products, including drugs, vaccines, cosmetics, household cleaners, pesticides, foodstuffs, and packing materials to ensure their safety. The safety testing of chemicals and consumer products accounts for only about 10% to 20% of the use of animals in laboratories, or approximately two to four million animals in the United States. Yet the use of animals in safety testing is the main issue in the animal research controversy. It raises issues such as the ethics and humaneness of deliberately poisoning animals, the propriety of harming animals for the sake of marketing a new cosmetic or household product, the applicability of animal data to humans, and the possibility of sparing millions of animals by developing alternatives to a handful of widely used procedures. There are many alternatives to animal testing and if people took time to use those alternatives, millions of animal's lives would be saved.
Webster's Dictionary defines vivisection as the action of cutting into or dissecting a living body, and the practice of subjecting living animals to cutting operations, especially in order to advance physiological and pathological knowledge (878). Vivisection is the word that explains animal testing and it can be found throughout our society. In the classroom, young people take part in dissection of frogs, bugs, worms, and other creatures in order to gain understanding of the particular body systems. It is used in some cases to understand the cause of death of an individual and scientists use animal testing to gain understanding to the cause and treatment of many common ailments.
The safety testing of chemicals and products is a relatively recent development in history. Safety testing grew out of other forms of testing. Initially, tests were developed to standardize new batches of powerful drugs like digitalis and insulin that were prepared from natural products and that varied in potency from batch to batch.