who has a pet at home? Raise your hand. Would you watch them getting tortured, Would you let your pet be tortured, just so you could buy that new mascara or shampoo. Bobbi Brown, MAC, Benefit, Victoria’s Secret, OPI and more than 100 other companies use animal testing in the production process of their cosmetic products. Over 100 million animals are tortured through animal testing every year in American labs. This is unnecessary and it is proven that these cosmetic tests do not actually help to develop the products as most animals have different reactions to these products than humans do.
Animal testing is the most prominent used method for testing cosmetic products before they are available for humans. Today I will be convincing you that Animal testing is bad and some alternatives to animal testing that other companies are using. To start with I will develop your idea on what animal testing is, then I will discuss how it can affect animals and us and finally I will talk about how we can stop animal testing.
“Mice are Mice and People are People” right… then why do we feel it is necessary for us humans to destroy their well beings and lives for a product that COULD work on us. Animal testing in cosmetics tests the products by dropping it in their eyes or on shaved skin in order to test the products properly. They watch the animals to make sure the products aren’t cancer causing or don’t cause birth defects. They also make sure there are no skin irritations or other health illnesses caused by this product. There are no guarantees that any of the cosmetic products tested will work on humans. In fact, many cosmetic products, that are animal tested have killed humans because animals do not have the same biological makeup as humans do, this can lead to unreliable results.
An example of this is an anti inflammatory drug Vioxx caused 100,000 people to have heart attacks, even after the product had been deemed safe after being tested on animals. Animals are tortured in many different ways before even being tested on. Many animals are immobilized in restraint devices, some have holes drilled into their skull and others have their skin burned off and their spines crushed. These animals are treated like disposable gloves, easy to throw away after they have been used. Animals are kept in cages and are deprived of any natural environments, that otherwise, they would be thriving in. Most of the tests kill up to 200,000 animals every time!
Imagine this… living your entire life in a cage. Being born into a metal cage where you are immediately separated from your parents. Then not long after, your hair is shaved off and these strange people with masks and gloves on put these solutions on your skin and it hurts, it hurts a lot. This is what most animals in captivity go through once they are born. And this happens for months on end. The animals go through this day in day out. Often one experiment can last up to a whole year until the product is ready for the public. This process is detrimental to the health and well-being of the animals. The animals become sad because they are constantly in pain. Most animals watch each other die, they lose family and friends to this sad process, that they are stuck in for doing nothing but being alive.
Most of us know you can’t give chocolate to dogs and you can’t give aspirin to cats because it’s harmful to them. Then why do we continue to test other products on them, if their biological makeup is different to ours. It clearly is not a very reliable procedure to go by, if it is killing one species but helpful for another. This annoys me because they are torturing innocent animals. Which to me seems unnecessary and cruel, it has been proven that animals have feelings, they can develop depression type conditions. Most of the animals do suffer from some sort of mental Illness because of the stress they have been put through.
This cruelty to animals can actually have an effect on humans. Various different products have failed on the human biological makeup even after being deemed safe through animal testing. This is dangerous for humans because they could cause illness or at the worst birth defects and cancer. The caretakers that work in the labs to care for the animals, can become attached to these helpless creatures. This becomes detrimental to their job because as they become attached they could start to have some unresolved internal struggles and conflict after the animal has died.
In many countries the taxpayers pay for a lot of animal testing, So even if you are against the process you are still supporting it and have no choice against this problem. All of these reasons are not helping to eliminate the process in ALL countries if the process was shut down thousands of people would lose their jobs, causing an increase in homeless citizens. It will also cause an increase in animals in animal care centers before they can be adopted which many of them will never be adopted and most will be killed anyway.
However… There is something that we can all do about it, we can make a change. Something that we can do is to buy animal cruelty-free products, there is a lot of alternatives to most of your cosmetics that are not tested on but will do the same thing. A cruelty-free company does not support animal testing and uses alternative ways to test their products before selling them. There are alternatives to animal testing, procedures such as in vitro, this is when scientists test products in test tubes against skin cell and tissue cultures. The alternatives also tend to be more accurate than animals testing.
The in vitro test has been deemed as more accurate when testing for skin irritations than animal testing is, this is because the products are ACTUALLY being tested on humans rather than being tested on animals which have different skin to us the results could be very different. The non-animal tests are actually more cost effective and practical, the in vitro test can take 3 minutes to 4 hours to have the results finished. Where as animal testing could take up to 4 whole weeks. It is estimated that the in vitro test method could test 5 to 6 products for half the cost of testing one product in animal testing. In vitro was first introduced in 2008, and it’s slowly becoming more well known and many more products are being tested with it.
So, now that you know what animal testing is, how it can affect us and that there are alternatives to the problem at hand. It’s time to buy products that don’t use animal testing, turn to the alternatives, throw out the products that affect these animals, in order to stop the companies from producing products this way.