The Voice – brought to you by The Page & Epistle

By Lely Yanega ’25

Symbols such as these are put on products that aren’t tested on animals. The most common animals that are tested on for these products are baboons, cats, cows, dogs, ferrets, fish, frogs, guinea pigs, hamsters, horses, llamas, mice, monkeys (such as marmosets and macaques), owls, pigs, quail, rabbits, rats, and sheep. It is estimated that 26 million animals are used every year in the United States for scientific and commercial testing (https://www.britannica.com/story/pro-and-con-animal-testing). These animals go through the unimaginable considering these testing vary from dogs having their organ removed to see how long they can survive without certain organs, to infecting animals with diseases such as RSV, COVID-19, and Ebola, in order to test the effects these diseases may have and to see if new medicine work. These tests can leave animals with lifelong trauma and in some cases, animals are killed in the process. These animals lose their freedom the second they enter the door of the testing facility. Many of these animals lose their life even before they die. They lose the ability to enjoy life, be happy, and be loved. They are put in crates, and they don’t interact with other animals or humans unless they are being tested. The amazing thing is that animals are forgiving, if these animals that have been used for testing get freed, they can still live happy lives and can learn to love humans again. However, they still see other animals leave their crates and never come back. They hear the other animals struggling. They go through so much trauma but even with that trauma they can forgive and move on to have a life of their own.

Although animal testing can be perceived as not right there is some pros to testing on animals.

PROS

• Animal testing contributes to life-saving cures and treatments and ensure they are safe.
• Animals are appropriate research subjects because they are similar to human beings in many ways.
• Animals must be used in cases when ethical considerations prevent the use of human subjects.
• Animals themselves benefit from the results of animal testing.
• Animals often make better research subjects than human beings because of their shorter life cycles. They reproduce faster.

• The vast majority of biologists and several of the largest biomedical and health organizations in the United States endorse animal testing.

CONS

• Scientists are able to test vaccines on human volunteers.

• Alternative testing methods now exist that can replace the need for animals.
• Animals are very different from human beings and therefore make poor test subjects.
• Drugs that pass animal tests are not necessarily safe.
• Animal tests may mislead researchers into ignoring potential cures and treatments.
• Only 5% of animals used in experiments are protected by US law.

• Animal tests do not reliably predict results in human beings.
• There is increasing demand for cruelty-free products.
• Most experiments involving animals are flawed, wasting the lives of the animal subjects.
• The Animal Welfare Act has not succeeded in preventing horrific cases of animal abuse in research laboratories.
• Medical breakthroughs involving animal research may still have been made without the use of animals.

Even though there are pros to animal testing, like checking the safety of products before being used on people, we still need to further our education in medical treatments and determine the potential dangers and risks.(https://www.britannica.com/story/pro-and-con-animal-testing)

How many of these products do you use? Personally, I was surprised by some of these companies. I have products that fall on both sides, and I definitely will be checking labels before buying products now. I hope you do the same. Animals are so amazing and don’t deserve to lose their life when there are alternative ways of testing which I will talk about more in part two.