Exploritory Essay

Kelsey Wilder

English 2 Block 2

Mrs. Mckoy

11^th September 2013

Animal Testing

I first got interested in the topic of animal testing when my sister Kaycie came home one day and started talking about it. She talked about what people do to animals when they test them and how badly mistreated the animals are. I absolutely love animals so when I heard about this, it broke my heart. My sister seemed to be pretty passionate about it to so we started looking on the back of products to see if they said whether they were animal tested or not. To my surprise a lot of them didn’t say that anything about if they were tested on animals. Which made us think if they didn’t clarify if they had been tested or not then they probably had been animal tested. We found a few things that said “not animal tested.” So to be safe we started using products that only said they weren’t animal tested. Ever since then I’ve been trying to stay away from things that are animal tested so at least I feel like I’m helping as much as I can for now.

In the article Wind of Change Challenges Toxicological Regulators it states “For a single chemical, a two-generation study uses on average 3,200 animals (mostly rats) (Rovida and Hartung 2009).” That’s 3,200 animals alone just in one study. Think about all the animal testing going on all around the world that adds up to be a lot of animals. “Ironically animal models as such have never been validated; rather, it has been taken on good faith that these studies are the best approach for protecting humans.” So people have been testing animals with the hope that it will protect humans not knowing for a fact whether 100% were completely safe. Animals aren’t good sources because we’re not sure that everything that’s safe on them is safe on humans to.

I want to research this issue further because I believe there are alternatives to animal testing. That animals don’t have to suffer to keep humans safe. With today’s technology and already gathered research that we can get away from animal testing and lean more towards the technology we have today. So many animals are hurt and killed from doing this unnecessary testing that we should use a new approach. I want to find out more about animal testing and different ways to prevent it. Is animal testing the best way to ensure our community is safe from bacteria and diseases? With the money it cost and the research we already have we should eliminate animal testing for good.