We as a society have to soon begin acknowleding the pain and death we cause to animals everyday. Lab practices are cruel and uncessary, but they're cheap so corporations and universities continue to test on animals. That's why we should all be purchasing products from companies that don't test on animals. Check the back of the items you buy. Your deodorant. Your shampoo. Your cleaning products. If it doesn't say that they don't test, they most likely do. It doesn't take much effort to really learn what you're spending your money on. Here are the top 10 things to know about animal testing:
http://getactive.peta.org/campaign/Test_Your_Compassion/explanation
Does Uncle Joe corner you at every family reunion to ask why you don’t like animal testing? Don’t quite know what to say when your friends ask why you only buy cruelty-free? Looking for easy ways to talk with coworkers about companies that test on animals? Check out our Animal Testing Top 10:
1. It’s wrong to subject animals to imprisonment, violence, and death—animals are not ours to use for experimentation.
2. Ninety-two out of every 100 drugs that pass animal tests fail in clinical trials in people. Every year in the United States alone, there are more than 100,000 human deaths caused by drugs that were successfully tested on animals.
3. Animals don’t suffer from diseases in the same way that people do. The former head of the U.S. National Cancer Institute summarized the last 25 years of cancer research by admitting that “the history of cancer research has been the history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades, and it simply didn’t work in humans ....”
4. Animal studies mislead researchers and waste precious time and resources. Famed primatologist and Harvard professor Richard Wrangham points out: “Every significant advance in the fight against AIDS has come through in vitro work, epidemiology, and studies of human volunteers. Early work with chimpanzees funneled scarce research funds away from more fruitful approaches.”
5. The list of medical conditions and therapies discovered and developed without animals is extensive and includes anesthesia, antisepsis, germ theory, morphine, radium, X-rays, the link between cholesterol and heart disease, the link between smoking and cancer, CAT scans, PET scans, and MRIs.
6. There are more effective research methods, including microdosing, the Hurel biochip, tissue engineering, sophisticated computer modeling, and more.
7. The Animal Welfare Act, the only federal law covering the use of animals in laboratories, doesn’t prevent poorly designed, redundant, or painful experiments. It only deals with housekeeping issues.
8. Three of the most commonly used types of animals in laboratory tests—mice, rats, and birds—are specifically excluded from even the minimum protections of the Animal Welfare Act.
9. Every time that PETA sends an undercover investigator into a laboratory, physical abuse and neglect are documented. Animals are yelled at, hit, left to suffer after surgery without anesthetics, repeatedly operated on, crammed into small cages, denied veterinary care, and more.
10. Every minute, 219 animals die in laboratories in the U.S., alone and in pain. Imagine living locked in a closet without control over any aspect of your life. You can’t choose when and what you eat, how you spend your time, whether you have a partner and children, and—if you do—who that partner is. You can’t even decide when the lights go on and off. Think about spending your entire life like this even though you haven’t committed any crimes. This is what life in a laboratory is like for animals. It is deprivation, isolation, misery, and death.Medical historians tell us that the majority of true medical breakthroughs have occurred in the clinic, not in the animal lab—the links between the pancreas and diabetes, plaque in the arteries and heart disease, cigarette smoking and lung cancer, etc. Also, sophisticated alternatives to animal tests, such as computer simulations and cell and tissue cultures, are faster, safer, and less expensive.For more information about why we shouldn’t use animals in medical experiments and to learn about alternative methods, companies that do and that don’t test on animals, and more ways to help, please visit StopAnimalTests.com.
