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When you use the cosmetic products, perfumes, hygiene products, and pharmaceutical drugs you see in your local drugstores, supermarkets, etc., there is a big chance that animal test subjects went through the pains of being abused, tortured, or poisoned in order for those said products to be able to be put on the shelves and be marketed. According to Humane Society International, 115 million animals are being used in lab testing each year, and 90% of the tests fail, according to the PETA organization. These statistics do not the suffering of millions of animals is often only in vain. Animal testing is an inhumane practice that is not as reliable as it is thought to be, thus putting the suffering of said animals in vain, and the practice continues today even if there are scientifically proven better ways to test products.
According to Humane Society International (2012), the animals that are commonly used for laboratory testing are guinea pigs mice, hamsters, rats, fish, farm animals, birds, cats, dogs, mini-pigs, and monkeys (non-monkey primate mammals). These “animals are used to develop medical treatments, determine the toxicity of medications, check the safety of products destined for human use, and other biomedical, commercial, and health care uses.” (ProCon.org, 2019) although animal testing has already been proven to not be that accurate, because of the fact that our biology is different from those of another species. To try and create an animal model that can be at least equated to what is trying to be achieved in the human body is very difficult, according to Paul Furlong, a professor of Clinical Neuroimaging at Aston University (UK).
Animal testing is also very expensive compared to that of the alternatives to this type of experimentation. Generally, animal testing tends to cost a large amount of money because of the fact that many factors come into play in terms of financial spending, like the animals’ food and housing, and the drugs or substances that the animals are treated with, not to mention the fact that the tests and experimentations may occur not only once, and can last up to how many months or even years, and at times it cannot be exactly predicted how long it will take an experiment to gather results (About Animal Testing, 2019). The price of the animals themselves should also be considered into the equation since the animals need to be bought from companies that specifically breed animals to become test subjects.
The abuse of animal testing may potentially help in the extinction of a certain species. Using animals to test the treatments created by researchers or medical officials to find a remedy for certain diseases can increase the chances of human survival. However, with the number of animals used for experimentation, over 26 million animal subjects are used every year in the United States alone (ProCon.org, 2019), it is already very alarming. According to Renee Cho (2019), overexploitation is listed as one of the modern causes of extinction. Animal exploitation includes the animals used for food, clothing, entertainment, companionship, and most specifically, the animals used in experiments, and considering the number of animals that are used, animal testing definitely has a big contribution to animal exploitation. As time passes and this exploitation continues, the animals that are drawn to experiments may go extinct. This will cause a disruption in the balance of the ecosystem. The Earth has this system called the food web where the living organisms and their environment are interrelated. “When you remove one element from a fragile ecosystem, it has a far-reaching and long-lasting effect on biodiversity.” Started by World Wildlife Funds. Each of the animals in every laboratory experiment has a major role in our ecosystem. We must take into account the possible danger it will bring if the mentioned animals above were to go extinct. “The National Research Council in the United States has expressed its vision of a not-so-distant future in which virtually all routine toxicity testing would be conducted in human cells or cell lines, and science leaders around the world have echoed this view.” (Humane Society International, 2012) If this vision of researchers were to be utilized in the future, all those people concerned with animal testing would no longer suffer from being silenced in their advocacies and opinions regarding this matter.
With regard to the morality of this practice, it is safe to say that this is a very backward and inhumane practice. Animal test subjects are constantly forced feed and inhaled, water deprivation, incredibly long periods of physical restraint, emotional stress, and infliction of all sorts of injuries like burns and wounds to study how the healing process works, according to Human Society International, “killing by carbon dioxide asphyxiation, neck-breaking, decapitation, or other means.” There is also what these researchers call the Draize eye test, in which cosmetic products evaluate the irritation factor that can be caused by their products by putting it on rabbits’ eyes with their eyelids forcefully open so they cannot blink away the products, and the LD50, short for Lethal Dose 50, a test that aims to examine whether a certain dose of chemical will kill 50% of the test subjects’ population. The purpose of non-human testing is to avoid the pain and suffering of human beings, but what if the suffering is from animals? Animal testing continues today because many consider it the lesser evil, but ‘evil’ is still ‘evil,’ If both are considered to be evil, then shouldn’t it be the goal to avoid these two altogether and find a better way to do research?
In our time today, many companies and organizations have been active in fighting against animal testing and have been bringing to light the issues and problems surrounding it to society, these companies and organizations have done so much to spread awareness about the dark secrets of animal testing we now know today, we still have a very long way to go. We need to let bigger parts of society, like the multibillion companies that actually participate in these experiments, know the sad truth about this type of cruelty, and force them to stop, because as an advancing species must think of the bigger picture and protect all animals from things like this.
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