Animal Testing

Each year in the United States, an estimated 70 million animals are maimed, blinded, scalded, force-fed chemicals and otherwise hurt and killed because of animal testing. Things we use every day like eye shadow, soap, and furniture polish may have been tested on rats, guinea pigs, dogs, rabbits, cats, and other animals. These tests are used to see if the produce is harmful or not. Animal tests can’t be used to treat or prevent injuries to humans. These tests are not required by law; they only protect them from consumer lawsuits. I believe animal testing is wrong and you should too. First of all, other tests besides animal testing can be used. These tests are proven more reliable and less expensive than animal testing. These tests are also seen as more humane. Instead of using live rabbits for the Draize Eye test, sophisticated computer models or corneas from eye banks can be used to test the irritancy level accurately. There are many other suitable tests also like chemical assay tests, tissue culture systems, cloned human skin cells and human skin cells. As you can see there are many other ways instead of animal testing to test products. Another reason to not do animal testing is because it isn’t moral. Animals have as much right to live as we do. When they are locked up they suffer tremendous stress. How do we know they don’t feel pain? Deaths through research are unnecessary and are morally no different from murder. Also strict controls do not prevent researchers from abusing animals. I strongly believe animal testing is not moral. Most importantly, does animal testing work? Animal tests can be misleading. An animals response to a drug can be different to a humans. Plus stress animals endure in labs can affect the experiments, making the results wrong. Also animals are still used to test things like cleaning products, which don’t benefit us much. Finally as I said before there are many other tests we can use instead. So why hurt the animals and us?