Animal Testing

[MurderDeathKill]

Full disclosure: This is for a project in my philosophy class, where you choose a cause and follow it for a few weeks and report back on how it changed your life, what have you. I decided to take a road less traveled and choose animal testing as my cause.

What that said, animal testing:

A popular way to fight animal testing is to simply not buy products from companies that test on animals, so I came here to ask for experiences from people who likely have been doing this for a lot longer than I have. How did you learn about this? How/when/why did you choose to stop supporting these sorts of things? Where do you buy your products? Are there any that simply don't have a viable alternative, 'cause they're too expensive/suck/don't exist? How's it affected your life? Do you do anything else to fight animal testing in any way?

 

[Brovo]

Well, I don't know about animal testing from a philosophical standpoint, but from a scientific standpoint, there are severe and system-wide issues concerning the relevancy and usefulness of animal testing data. Multiple animal tests which result in harm to animals go ahead for clinical trials in humans anyway. Even if it does have some sort of benefit, the ability to discern that benefit has been so badly mishandled that it may as well be worthless.

There are multiple calls within the scientific community to investigate this questionable practice, but they rarely get funded to a level where such investigations can prove entirely fruitful or impactful.

It's especially made questionable why we continue this practice when it turns out that multiple drugs which harm humans prove beneficial in their animal counter-parts and vice versa. Even for diseases which are the same, but simply cross-species. Simple differences like how the human immune system works or how infections affect open wounds can completely fuck up how drugs within animals can affect humans. Hell, even something as simple as injecting testosterone into women or estrogen into men can result in symptoms as wide as decreasing or increasing bone density, aggression, feminine or masculine features, muscle growth, the creation of serotonin receptors in the brain, or even result in extremes of long term damage to sexual organs.

If chemicals can have different effects based on differences as small as the sex of the species, the idea that we can accrue completely reliable data from animals--who are far more removed genetically speaking--is silly, except in the most extreme of cases. (Like, cancer. Cancer works the same everywhere, so if you could find a cancer killer that didn't indiscriminately murder all the cells around the cancer, it should likely work equally well in every scenario you can put it in.)

At the very least we need to shut down animal testing for all non-medicine related things. The fact that we abuse animals to test the safety of, say, hair care products, is fucking obscene and needs to stop. Our vanity is not worth the torturing of living, feeling things.

EDIT

As for what I can do to fight animal testing? Aside from vocalizing about it and avoiding purchasing products related to animal testing, I can't do anything. The sad part is that animal testing often soaks up government research funds, or private companies that try to hide via proxy corporations their spending. So hair care companies might hide their backing of animal testing facilities via a puppet corp. It's shady shit, and it's hard to track because people largely just assume animal testing is legit, so there's not a huge movement to question it.