Do animals used in research experience pain and stress?
Animals do experience pain in research being done specifically to study pain, or where the use of painkillers would adversely affect the scientific results. However, such experiments (which represent less than 3 percent of all animal studies) are necessary so that scientists may develop better painkillers and safer anaesthetics and thereby benefit both humans and animals. A fraction of the research experiments may involve some discomfort or pain such as that experienced when recovering from surgical procedures. In these cases, the animals receive anaesthetics and/or pain-killers – just as humans do when they have surgery. But the vast majority of biomedical research experiments do not involve any pain or discomfort. When research animals must be used in the small percentage of modern pain studies, scientists usually set the pain levels on themselves first, and therefore, animals are exposed to minimal pain discomfort. Furthermore, the conditions animals experience in laboratories are a
