The Cruelty of Animal Testing

Animal testing is a cruel way to try and develop new products. There are several other and much safer options that will get better results and potentially save up to two million animals every single year. The Animal Welfare Act is in place but only minimally protects certain animals and leaves many others, up to 95%, vulnerable to atrocious fates. The animals not protected by this act (mostly small or considered house pets) are most widely used and not related closely to humans. There are several alternative methods but they are being neglected since they are new and not being enforced because of it. A few countries and states have banned certain aspect of animal testing but others are encouraging this cruelty.

There are so many products being tested on animals , from being lipsticks, shampoos, makeup, skin care etc. But have you ever wondered the side effects these animals experience while using these products? They will experience Burning, torturing, pain, hunger, thirst etc. How is living in a cage living? It's not it is just surviving.

Animal testing is a common practice in current life that is necessary to ensure the safety of the humans that will be using the tested product. There are many good and bad aspects of animal testing, but the pros clearly outweigh the cons. Animal testing has been around since ancient times when animals were dissected to gain knowledge about the body and organs. The animals killed from animal testing make up a tiny percentage of the total animals killed every year. When just considering the animals used for food compared to the animals used for testing, testing animals make up a mere 2.6 percent of that number. Public safety far outweighs the lives of the small amount of animals killed.

“Lots of people talk to animals…Not very many listen, though…That’s the problem”(Ben Hoffman). The controversy of animal testing is phenomenal; it always has been. I remember dissecting animals throughout my years of school in the "name of science". It was only until recently that I started questioning the government 's methods to teach us. We dissected a dog shark in my oceanography class last year. There had to been at least 80 dead sharks in about four different buckets; that was when it crossed the line. I understood a lamb eye or something, but breeding sharks in captivity just so they can be killed? Animal testing is wrong in every way to me.

Although animals testing help humans in many ways it can be cruel and inhuman to the animals being tested on. Depending on which lab the end up in they could be treated poorly and starved. They could be “inflicted with burn wounds and pain to test for a healing process” (Brown, 2017). This is cruel and just wrong for many reasons. “When testing to evaluate irritation caused by

Animal testing has been a controversial topic for many generations throughout the world. People against animal testing say that animal testing is cruel and inhumane and

Animal testing is cruel and inhumane. According to Humane Society International, animals used in experiments are commonly subjected to force feeding, forced inhalation, food and water deprivation, prolonged periods of physical restraint, the infliction of burns and other wounds to study the healing process, the infliction of pain to study its effects and remedies, and "killing by carbon dioxide asphyxiation, neck-breaking, decapitation, or other means." [47] The Draize eye test, used by cosmetics companies to evaluate irritation caused by shampoos and other products, involves rabbits being incapacitated in stocks with their eyelids held open by clips, sometimes for multiple days, so they cannot blink away the products being tested. [48][49] The commonly used LD50 (lethal dose 50) test involves finding out which dose of a chemical will kill 50% of the animals being used in the experiment. [65][102] The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported in 2016 that 71,370 animals suffered pain during experiments while being given no anesthesia for relief, including 1,272 nonhuman primates, 5,771 rabbits, 24,566 guinea pigs, and 33,280 hamsters. [121]

The controversy behind animals as research subjects is mainly one of morals and the ethical treatment of said animals. Many people believe we should use them in this way, so we aren 't actually harming people in the pursuit for better things for humans. Though animal testing was a viable resource for many years, it has proven to be extremely controversial and unethical, therefor the use of animals as research subjects should be outlawed.

For decades, people have been using animals as the go-to method for testing scientific breakthroughs, but not only is this concept outdated, it is a cruel punishment inflicted on harmless creatures. Animal cruelty is a well-known problem around the United States that is a growing issue for debate. A study has shown that less than 2% of human illnesses are found in animals and over 98% are ineffective on animals (Peta2). “The Food and Drug Administration reports that 92 out of every 100 drugs that pass animal tests fail in humans” (PETA). Not only does animal testing hurt the animals, it is a waste of time. These are just some of the reasons why animal testing is pointless and should be banned. It is time that the United States recognizes animal testing as unacceptable because of its negative effects on both humans and animals: it is inhumane for many reasons, it proves to be very expensive and costly, and it’s pointless on many accounts.

One of the main cosmetic tests used is the “Lethal Dose 50” or (LD50). In this test, animals are forced to swallow large amounts of the chemicals being tested to verify the dosage level that will cause death (Corazza, 2017). It is known to cause intense pain and suffering on the animals. Chemicals are pumped into an animal's stomach until it dies. The reason for the intense pain is that it can take days or even weeks before the animal dies. In the rare case where test animals are not killed during the experiment, they are then, “killed either by asphyxiation, breaking of the spinal cord or decapitation” ("Ward: End support of animal testing by using cruelty free cosmetics", 2015). Humans use animals to test drugs and cosmetics but they do not respect the animal enough to provide them with a humane death. Animals are burned, blinded, poisoned, force-fed chemicals, genetically manipulated, electrocuted and killed, all in the name of science. How is the death of millions of animals fair and humane for results that are not necessarily justified?

Before this chapter gets into how animals are tested, you should know about the purposes of animal testing. Most of the times, people study how the animal's behavior or body has changed after giving them any range of things. These can include radiation, toxic gases, and more harmful substances. “Over 100 million animals are burned, crippled, poisoned, and abused in US labs every year.” (DoSomething.org) Toxicity testing, determining the degree to which a substance can damage a living or nonliving organism, often leaves animals dead before the test is even finished. Some irritation tests include seeing how the chemical goes through the layers of cells through the eyes and skin. Acute toxicity testing is usually one test or a few in a short period of time. This leads to high dose amounts which gives much worse side effects inclusive of abdominal pain, seizures, paralysis, and more. After the animals are tested, they stay in cages without fresh air or seeing light. One of the worst parts is that after all the testing, the product might not even be suitable for humans. All these animals have a brain in which they can feel pain and emotion. Us humans are animals too, why should we do this to our

Animal testing can be extremely cruel to animals. The Animals Humane Society has stated that animals that undergo commercial and medical testing, frequently are force fed, deprived of food and water, burned, and physically abused in many other ways. There is a test called the Draize Eye test, that beauty companies use, to test irritation

Each year in America 100 million animals die from animal testing. Many animals suffer the pain through animal testing, even though they have found more accurate testing without using animals. Sometimes the drugs that pass animals do not always have the same effect on humans. Some of the new methods even mimic parts of the human body. Testing drugs on animals is not an acceptable way to test because drugs passing animal tests are not always safe, what they do to animals is cruel and inhumane, and because they have found other safer ways to run the tests.

Test animals are subjected to intense pain and suffering like burn, scrape and infection. A perfectly fine rabbit is shaved and chemicals are rubbed onto its bare skin or eye irritation tests is performed by dripping chemicals into its eyes without any pain relief. Repeated oral force-feeding studies are conducted to look for signs of general illness or health hazards like cancer or birth defects. Sometimes these animals are also forced to swallow massive amounts of chemical to determine the maximum dose that can cause death. The saddest part of this is these tests can take weeks or even months to come up with a result and these poor animals are tortured every day to get to that result. At the end of the test, most of the animals are killed either by neck-breaking or decapitation and in some cases if they can be reused for other experiments, they are abused

According to PETA, every year, millions of animals are poisoned and killed in barbaric tests that were crudely developed as long ago as the 1920s to evaluate the toxicity of consumer products and their ingredients. Rats, mice, guinea pigs, rabbits, and other animals are forced to swallow or inhale massive quantities of a test substance or endure the pain of a chemical eating away at their sensitive eyes and