Angel For Animals » Animal Testing

Animal Testing

Following on from the introductory post simply entitled: Angel For Animals, in this post we want to look at the controversial subject of animal testing.

Its a hard and cruel fact of life that safety tests are routinely conducted on a wide range of chemicals and consumer products. These include drugs, vaccines, cosmetics, pesticides, household cleaners, foodstuffs and of all things, packing materials.

Safety testing of chemicals and consumer products probably accounts for about 10 to 20% of the use of animals in laboratories. That equates to approximately 2 to 4 million animals in the United States alone.

The use of animals for safety tests is something that figures prominently in the controversy over animal research.

Animal testing raises many issues. These include the ethics and humaneness of poisoning animals in tests, whether animal data is even applicable to humans, the harming of animals for the sake of marketing a new household product or cosmetic and whether it is possible to instead spare millions of animals by finding and developing alternatives to these widely used procedures.

We should be promoting alternatives to the use of animal testing for products as well as biomedical research and education. Alternatives exist - it just takes brave pioneers to implement the correct scientific methods to accomplish the same goals.

For many years, various pressure groups have encouraged companies and manufacturers to produce (and importantly, consumers to purchase) cosmetics and household products that have not used animal testing methods to bring them into the marketplace.

The ultimate aim is to urge household products and cosmetics manufacturers that used animal testing to sign on to the Corporate Standard of Compassion of Animals.

This is a rigorous manufacturing and product labeling policy. The Corporate Standard of Compassion of Animals ensures manufacturers and suppliers do not conduct or commission animal testing, nor will they use any ingredient or formulation that is tested on animals. Manufacturing and production companies who sign the standard are permitted to portray the coalition’s “leaping bunny” logo on their products as visual proof to the consumer of their commitment to the manufacturing of animal testing free and cruelty-free products.

The more weight this movement gathers, then the less animal testing that will be carried out, which in the long term can only be a good thing for our angel animals.