Despite the growth over the past thirty years, animals continue to suffer in laboratories all over the world because of tests that the government requires for ingredients used in cosmetics. Animal testing is any experiment that includes a live animal to undergo a process that is likely to cause them pain, suffering or long lasting harm. The animals that are used are deliberately designed to see if the effects of the cosmetics on their skin, eyes or body are harmful or not. Once the tests are over, the animals will be killed and dissected with no pain relief whatsoever. Based on the human society, it states, “At the end of the tests, the animals are killed, normally by asphyxiation, neck-breaking or decapitation. Pain relief is not provided. In the United States, a large percentage of the animals used in such testing (such as laboratory-bred rats and mice) are not counted in official statistics and receive no protection under the Animal Welfare Act.” This means that the poor animals do not have any sense of pain relief and are just discarded like they’re nothing. The lack of ethical concerns raises many questions about the human treatment of animals.
These tests include:
* Forcing animals to inhale toxic gases.
* Force feed or inject animals with harmful substances and chemicals.
* Remove the animal’s organs or tissues to cause damage and inspect the effects.
* Dripping cosmetics chemicals into their eyes.
The animal’s rights are taken away without any thought of their well-being or quality of their lives. I believe that animal experimentation should be banned because it violates the rights of animals and it’s just an inhumane thing to put those animals through. Various studies has shown that back when animal experimentation first began, there were very few ethical concerns about the matter of whether animals should even have rights and it did not become a topic of discussion until the 1980’s, when multiple animal protection groups such as the Coalition for Consumer Information on Cosmetics formed with the purpose to advocate for alternative testing methods. They took the initiative to question whether using live animals is the correct thing to do or if there’s any other alternative we can all collectively support. In 2000’s the Alternative Methods Authorization Act was signed which was a major change to combat animal testing making all of their efforts worth it.
People often argue that using animals is better than using humans and that it’s for our own benefit. According to Stanford Medicine, ‘Why Animal Research?’ It states “Animals are biologically very similar to humans. In fact, mice share more than 98% DNA with us.” Thus making the use of animals more susceptible to many of the same health problems as humans like cancer, diabetes and heart conditions. Since animals have the same organs like us, it is more effective to use them rather than humans. However, I think that it’s useless using them with the excuse of medical advances because the results from experiments are not completely reliable and enough to justify the deaths of thousands of live animals. According to Aysha Akhtar, a neurologist, “Imprecise results from animal experiments may result in clinical trials of biologically faulty or even harmful substances, thereby exposing patients to unnecessary risk and wasting scarce research resources. Animal toxicity studies are poor predictors of toxic effects of drugs in humans.” This demonstrates that even by using animals for our safety, there are many experiments where investigators were misled by the results and created a false sense of security to those involved. Humans were hurt because the tests were not useful and innocent animals died for nothing.
If we want to use cosmetics and not support animal testing, check out the website https://crueltyfree.peta.org/ to see which brands are safe to use and which ones to avoid!
