The topic of animal cruelty is one of great importance to the wold today. Whywe humans have the right reserved to treat animals as lesser individuals isbeyond me.
Animals are fulfilling their part in the ecosystems and communitiesof the earth, and to the best extent that they are able. For example, a spideris being the best possible spider that it can be, spinning webs and workingdiligently at what it knows best, not bothering any creatures of the earthbesides the ones which it needs to capture for food.
We, as humans, decided thatwe are a much advanced life form and can basically treat anything else in thisworld in ways which we cannot imagine being treated. As a result the threadsholding our earth together tightly in the balance are being slowly unraveled tolead into ultimate self-destruction. In 1988, 16, 989 animals died in laboratories in the United Kingdom.
This wasdue to such tests as acute and chronic toxicity experiments, where the animalsare forced to consume substances such as perfume, make-up and other beautyproducts and are often literally poisoned, their systems literally overloaded bythe substance in question. Another testing method is the Lethal Dose 50 percenttest or LD50. In this procedure at least half of the animals must die in orderfor the government to figure out how much a human can ingest without dying. In one such test some animals were fed 4. lb. of lipstick and one ended updying of intestinal obstruction.
In another, 7 pints of melted eye shadow wasfed to rats. In yet another, mice were wrapped in tin foil and grilled inultraviolet light to test a sun block cream for a total of 96 hours. The resultsof the test were that the longer the mice stayed in the rays, the more sunburntthey got. But that is not all.
A wax product used in many cosmetics was dosed intoanimals by a stomach tube. The amount that they used is equivalent to feeding 1 lb of the stuff to humans. The animals involved soon began salivating, bleedingfrom the nose and mouth, and had extreme diarrhoea. As the test progressed somemore, the animals became emaciated and unkempt, had congestion in the lungs andkidneys and solid wax in the stomach.
The infamous Draize eye test cannot be forgotten either. Chemicals areinstilled into the eyes of rabbits in stocks, often for up to seven days. Andbecause their eyes are physiologically different from ours, they cannot produceenough tears to wash the substance away and it remains there for long periods oftime. Unfortunately for them, rabbits are cheap and simple to maintain, and theyalso have large eyes. In the acute inhalation test the animals are subjected to intense amounts of acertain substance or toxin in a small caged environment for four days to testthe effects of chemical inhalants used in aerosol spray cans and other gaseousmaterials. The animals which actually survive the test are then killed to beexamined.
This is also done with tobacco products and alcohol. Another instance included the removal of infant rhesus monkeys from theirmothers at birth and isolated or given cheap substitutes to study the need for amaternal figure early on in life. After 4 months some of the babies were able tointegrate back into a normal monkey society, the ones isolated for a year ormore had definite social problems. To attempt to find more out about our sexuality we of course turn to cats.
After some nerve surgery, the cats involved became disoriented and lost interestin sexual activity. There was also the dastardly one in which some silly scientist removed a cat’sbrain to see if it could still walk afterwards. Vivisection is of course the live dissection of animals for scientificresearch, and is quite widespread in use today. Most of these are performedwithout the use of anaesthetics. The ironic thing regarding this entire situation is the fact that animals, forthe most part, have a very different body chemistry than us, and, as a whole,are very different than us.
So basically none of these tests has any relevancyfor us today. As well, there is a widespread range of natural products alreadyavailable to us which most scientists and doctors refuse to acknowledge becausethere is more money in animal research. This is sadistic and wrong. Somegovernments are pushing for mandatory animal testing on all .
