Animal Testing: Inhumane and Unnecessary | Teen Ink

Animal Testing: Inhumane and Unnecessary

October 24, 2012
By Elaina Frankos BRONZE, Park Ridge, Illinois
Elaina Frankos BRONZE, Park Ridge, Illinois
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

Think about all the products that you used today: maybe you used cosmetics this morning, or took a medication, or used a household cleaner. Now imagine that for each of these products, a dozen or more innocent animals died during the testing of it. Each year, millions of animals, ranging from mice to monkeys, suffer through the cruel and inhumane practice of animal testing. These helpless creatures are kept in tiny, filthy cages, subjected to painful and gruesome tests, and even killed in the process of testing common consumer products. Companies routinely torture and kill innocent animals, all in the name of human safety. However, animal testing provides inaccurate, misleading, and unhelpful results. Many products, most famously thalidomide in the 1970’s, have been proven safe when tested on animals, but caused horrific side effects when used on humans. It would be one thing if animal testing actually helped to save human lives, but false results in these tests in fact does more harm than good. Testing products on animals fails to provide benefits for humans, so there’s no need for companies to continue wasting the lives of millions of animals. As a consumer, you can help by buying products that haven’t been tested on animals, so next time you open up your cosmetics, or medicine, or household cleaner, you’ll know that the only cost of that product was your money, not an animal’s life.



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This article has 2 comments.


on Nov. 6 2012 at 4:02 pm
The author really needs to broaden her reading beyond PeTA and BUAV propagada, the picture of animal research she paints is very inaccurate. For a start testing of cosmetics on animals has been banned in the UK for more than a decade, and is now banned across the EU. Thalidomide was never tested on pregnant animals before being given to pregnant women, if it had been there is a very good chance the tragedy would have been avoided (see http://speakingofresearch.com/extremism-undone/bad-science/#12). While there are now in vitro embryotoxicity tests thatare used to screen medicines, none can detect the teratogenic effect of Thalidomide, so some screening in pregnant animals is sometimes required. Animal research still plays a crucial role in advancing medical science, as this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for stem cell research demonstrated http://speakingofresearch.com/2012/10/08/reprogramming-of-frog-and-mouse-cells-wins-the-2012-nobel-prize/

LondonP said...
on Nov. 5 2012 at 5:35 am
Clearly the aithor has not been into labs. Cages are not tiny - most rats are socially housed in large cages with enrichment they can play around on. Thalidomide was not tested on pregnant animals - thus the side effects were never seen.