Today is Sunday, Sue’s cleaning day. Sue wakes up and gets in the shower, where she uses her Vidal Sassoon shampoo and conditioner, her Nair shaving cream, and her Lava Soap. After she’s done she almost immediately begins brushing her teeth using her Colgate toothpaste and Plax mouthwash, then applies her Lubriderm lotion, her Arrid deodorant, and her Cover Girl makeup products. She blows her nose in her Kleenex tissue and gets dressed in hr Calvin Klein clothes. Throughout the day Sue uses Pledge, Windex, Drano and Glade to help keep her house looking clean and smelling fresh.
Before the sun goes down, she still finds time to sunbathe using her brand new bottle of Banana Boat sun tanning lotion. Millions of other people use these same products every day. The products all have one very important thing in common: the chemical testing performed by the companies that manufacture them contribute to the hundreds of millions of animals that suffer and die every year. Although many people believe these resulting deaths are frequently clean, painless and simple for the animal to go through, this is very seldom the truth.
In the United Kingdom alone, over 2. 5 million cats, dogs, mice, gerbils, hamsters, and other animals die due to chemical testing every year. This does not include the 8 million that are bred and then killed because they are surplus, nor does that figure include the many millions more that die needlessly due to animal testing in other areas of the world. Animals are tested on in every way possible, from the removal of vital body organs to exposure to lethal chemicals.
Many of them are only tested on once before they are left to suffer and die in a cage. In a study conducted by IAMS, the pet food company owned by Proctor & Gamble, 24 young dogs had their right kidneys removed and their left kidneys destroyed at least 75% to investigate how protein affects dogs with kidney failure. Eight additional dogs were killed to analyze the kidney tissue, and those dogs which became sick were not treated because “it would have undermined the test results. Eventually, all animals tested were killed regardless of the progress of the kidneys. In another test repeatedly performed by the Department of Transportation, the backs of rabbits are being shaved and corrosive chemicals such as Savage Acid and Goodbye Graffiti are applied to their raw skin. The chemicals are left on their backs for up to two weeks and the rabbits are given no pain relief for the burning caused by these chemicals. After the testing has been administered, the rabbits are killed.
These examples do not constitute even a small fraction of both the procedures performed on animals and the vast amounts of anguish and suffering they are subject to. In most if not all of the chemical test performed, there are alternatives. In the above-mentioned test, instead of rabbits, a non-animal test that has been Federally approved, called Corrositex, is available. Medical and drug testing can be done using EpiPack, a device that uses cloned human tissue. Tests can be performed on human volunteers instead of using involuntary animals.
Many “cruelty-free” companies have been successful: Revlon, Abercrombie & Fitch, Bath & Body Works, Tommy Hilfiger, Nexxus, Jheri Redding, Mary Kay Cosmetics, and Trader Joe’s are just a few. There are also many other known available alternatives to using animal testing and some that haven’t been discovered yet. Some people say previous animal testing has benefited the human species through finding vaccines for diseases and working towards cures for AIDS, cancer, and a numerous amount of other health issues.
While many treatments have been discovered this way, the results of the experiments were sadly exaggerated and/or misrepresented. Quite a few other treatments were proven to be false after being tested on humans. In one such study, the drug milrinone was found to increase the survival of rats with artificially induced heart failure; however, when given to humans with severe chronic heart failure, there was a 30 percent increase in mortality. Some studies have even proven to be completely ineffective to humans, such as one study done on cancer.
Rats have been injected with carcinogens for years while scientists attempt to find a cure. Yet the human cancer rate gets higher and higher every decade. This is mainly due to the physiological differences among every species; a cat is different from a dog, which is different from a horse, which is different from a rat, etc. Scientists will never receive truly accurate results from performing chemical testing unless the tests are performed upon humans. This is something that can never and will never change.
By performing chemical testing on animals, humans are not only demeaning the morality and values that we pride ourselves on but also quite possible creating many more extinct species. Humans are animals too; although certainly more “advanced,” what makes us any more favorable than the other species? As it stands now, if animal testing is continued, our ecological system as we know it will be destroyed even further than what it is now. Eliminating animal testing is the first step in saving our ecology, and perhaps our future.
