Liz Machado-The horror of animal testing is becoming more significant yet no one knows how big a problem it is. People don’t pay attention to what animal testing really is and why we still have to perform cruel tests on animals when there are other experiments that exist and are cruelty free.
Animal testing is experimenting on animals to further scientific study or test new products before they’re purchased and used by humans. These procedures have been around since the beginning of time. Animal experiments have existed since the beginning of time, but around the early to mid-1900s is when it became more abusive.
Since 1938, makeup companies have used animal testing to make sure their product is safe for human skin, implementing the hurtful Draize eye/skin tests in 1944. The Draize test is the procedure of dropping product into animals eyes or shaving their skin and testing a product on the shaved portion. It often results in ulceration, inflamed or bleeding skin, swollen eyes, and blindness. Thankfully. this particular test was deemed no longer required in 2005 by the FDA, but some companies do still use the procedure today, and it’s still legal. For hundreds of years, beagles have been used to study the cardiovascular system and heart attacks, since they have a similar cardiovascular system to humans. They are given shocks to simulate heart attacks and have medicine forced down their throats.
While these practices seem very helpful to humans, we often dismiss the toll it takes on these animals that we are using as our guinea pigs (pun intended).
These results are also inaccurate, considering many animals don’t react to everything the same way we humans do. For instance; as I described earlier, beagles are often used for cardiovascular studies. But they do not develop cardiovascular disease the same way we do, but the way the scientist conduct the experiment it is not the way a real heart attack forms - it’s a simulation. So how can we be sure that these tests are vital to us and accurate if we aren’t testing with the actual disease and the humans they occur in?
Along with the fact that it simply isn’t 100% reliable, animal testing is also cruel and inhumane. Animals go blind, they are shocked and stabbed to simulate physical and mental illnesses, and after it’s all over they are euthanized, not set free. They feel pain and trauma, they’ve learned not to trust humans from the experiences that they’ve had. And these experiments are not just with rats, they still use many animals that we consider our best friends. They test on dogs, cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, and many other animals.
There are alternatives to these tests - we have plenty of scientific resources that we can use to test products that don’t have to involve harming animals. There is a bill pending called the Humane Cosmetics Act which will ban animal testing for cosmetics in the United States. There are scientists currently developing three-dimensional molds of artificial human skin to test cosmetics. “We have enough scientific technology to end animal testing; these advances can and should be happening” according to Dr. Carol Barker, the founder of XCellR8, one of the companies that work with Lush Cosmetics to end animal cruelty.
If you are interested in helping to stop animal testing, you can start by clicking on the “end animal testing now” button on Lush’s website to send a letter to your representative urging them to co-sponsor the Humane Cosmetics Act, which is currently pending with 180 cosponsors existing as of the beginning of October 2018. We can have a future where animals no longer have to be tortured for our gain. Be a part of that future.
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