Little regard for the scientific method in animal research....yes, that's a problem.

Upon further constructive input, I’ve decided to tweak my research topic a bit because I had failed to maintain my objectivity.  I was going to set out to prove that animal research was justified, or at least had its merits.  What I should be doing with the first daft of my research topic is simply stating the topic and attempting to get to the bottom of the issue to determine the truth.  I haven’t completed my revision of the research topic just yet, so I can’t share it at the moment.

I found an interesting article by Ian Roberts in which he disputes the validity of animal research based on the fact that all too frequently, there is a sloppy application of the scientific method.  He cites research in which fluid resuscitation was used to save the life of an animal from bleeding to death after having its tail severed.  The problem with this experiment was that the scientific method dictates that if you are going to research a hypothesis, you have to conduct an experiment several times and only change a single variable to determine how that single variable effects the outcome.  What was actually done in this experiment, were widespread variations of several factors.  Pigs, mice, rats and sheep were used, all of varying body types, varying times after which the fluid resuscitation was administered and varying amounts of fluid used.  When several variables were changed it was impossible to determine how each variable effected the outcome, making the research useless.  This sort of widespread carelessness in the application of the scientific method jeopardizes the validity of animal research.  This was but one instance cited by Dr Bailey.  He mentions that of several experiments he reviewed, only a small percentage of experiments utilized the scientific method appropriately.

The itself is a .gov domain and part of the US National Library of Medicine and is peer reviewed.  It even includes detailed test results.  This is why I will probably use it as one of my reliable sources.  What else matters to me about this site is its references.  The specific web page was part of a much larger investigation into determining the not only the moral implications of animal experimentation, but also its validity.  The references are numerous and will require a lot of time to go over, but I’m excited to read all of them already.