Speech- Animal Testing
While lathering your head in shampoo or applying make-up to your face ever thought, ‘How is this safe to use?’, ‘How did scientists figure out that these products are safe and non-toxic?’ Well the procedure that is taken place to answer these questions is Animal Testing. Yup! Feeble and vulnerable animals are being tortured and abused without any say in what happens to them. I think this topic is not talked about commonly and inhumane. From the horrible things I've learned throughout writing this, I think it’s important to share and persuade you that this is a disgusting and cruel action.
The definition of animal testing is ‘Animal testing is also known as animal experimentation, animal research and in vivo testing, is the use of non-human animals in experiments. What this means is that scientists or people who experiment on animals are testing out new products or medicines on animals. This is because some of these products may be harmful to humans and if the animals react negative to the chemicals from the product, they know not to use it on humans. During this process what happens to the animals are appalling. Some of the gruesome events that have taken place while the experiments were carried out are the injection of harmful substances into the skin, abdomen and muscle of the animal, the animals are exposed to drugs that cause them illness, pain, distress or death, they are forced to eat and inhale toxic chemicals and most of the animals die by the time the experiments are over.
Animals are a part of our world and without them I know lots of people whose lives would change drastically. My neighbor had a dog that sadly passed away and she cried for days. Imagine if that same dog or any other pet had died from an unnatural cause such as chemicals in his/her system or injections into their skin; she would've mourned even more. All of those animals that are just lying there slowly dying out don’t need that. What they need is that a home and people to love them and take care of them or they need to be put back into the wild in their natural habitat, it depends on what type of animal they are, the animals should not be left to rot in a lab. All of the creatures are just taken against their will and I’m sure they don’t want that. We don’t see scientists taking random people off the street without asking them and just going to experiment on them, so why do it to animals?
Another reason why animal testing should be discontinued is that our human bodies might not react the same ways an animals would because the human race is a different species. Earlier this week while I was doing my research I started to read this article from huffpost.com. Part of it states that ‘Although we share most of our genes with other mammals, there are critical differences in how our genes actually function.’ An example of this could be a piano, you play all of the same keys for each song but yet each song comes out in a different tune and has a different melody. So this means that if a product is tested on an animal and comes out positive, if we use it on humans it might act negatively on us. If this happens all of these poor animals are dying for no reason.
Animal testing does happen in Canada. Canada only supports animals testing to help in health and medical care but this is still injustice. I still think this should be banned and not used at all. I don’t think we need animals to help us improve our medicine. We can find many other ways with the amount of science and technology we have. It’s shocking to see the products that are tested on animals. Some of them are the most common products in many households. Some of them are Vaseline, Windex, Dettol and Dawn.
‘To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less than that of a human being. The more helpless the creature the more that it is entitled to protection by man from the cruelty of man’
-Mahatma Gandhi
I think this is true. Animals can’t speak up for themselves because they can’t speak and we cannot take advantage of this. Like the quote said the more helpless they are the more protection they need. I think that animal testing is brutal and relentless and with all the science and technology we have today we can find other ways to ensure that products are safe to use on humans.
Thank You!
