“Animal rights is an idea and a movement that asserts that animals should be able to live free of human interference and that they should never be exploited for human gain”- Grant Lingel. Animal abuse is practiced in many states, from animal testing, factory farming, and modest clothing.
Animal testing involves the engagement of live animals being used as a testing source for human benefit. Unfortunately, animals are being tortured to reassure we have safe products. Many makeup lines such as MAC, Urban Decay, Revlon, Aveeno, and many others use animals to test their products. Animals are exposed to excruciating pain, according to Dosomething.org, “several cosmetic tests commonly performed in mice, rats, rabbits and guinea pigs include: skin, and eye irritation tests where chemicals are rubbed on shaved skin or dripped into the eyes without any pain relief “. Animals are treated with little respect and sadly our generation does not cherish the life of living things. It is not up to us to decide an animals faith, unfortunately not only are we participants of millions of deaths but we determine the amount of suffrage they undergo until finally put at peace, in other words death. Makeup, household items, and even sweets such as chocolate bars are unnecessary items and primarily the cause of animal cruelty.
We need to ask ourselves if those items are worth the pain and death of innocent creatures. Animals are a use to scientific experiments for different experiments that later in the future will be an advantage for humans. According to Bloyd, Sunni, “scientists pledge to refine their techniques so as to induce the minimum amount of suffering; reduce the number of animal use and replace animals with other techniques wherever possible (Sunni 1995).” As of today the percentage of animal usage in scientific labs has not decreased.
Factory farming has been around since the 1960’s and has been a huge part of animal cruelty. Founded in the 1960’s, factory farming was established to maximize efficiency and production. Animals such as cows, chickens, and pigs are exposed to chemical substances that are input into them to increase their weight. As for the premature animals, they are taken away from their mother at birth and sanctioned in a different area. They are constantly abused by the workers and are put in tight places where they struggle to move around. They are forced to live in atrocious conditions where they are exposed to maggots, diseases, and their own fetus. Piglets are slapped into the floor to successfully kill them in a way they find faster and easier; although, not all piglets die on the first throw making them suffer twice the amount. Animals are fed on a strict diet that is abnormal to their kind, ThoughtCo. says, “ animals are fed corn, wheat, and soy that are grown through intensive industrial farming that use large amounts of pesticides which can remain in their bodies and are passed on to the people who eat them(Lind 2019).”
There is always a consequence to the choices we make, consuming the meat from factory farm animals eliminates the nutrient that grass based meat would have and could create long term consequences such as health hazards, birth defects, and environmental threats. As ThoughCo states, “confining animals in one place produces more waste than the surrounding land can handle. As a result, factory farms are associated with various environmental hazards; such as water, land and air pollution (Lind 2019)”. The animal waste is being inserted into clean lakes or holes that are dug, resulting in hazardous air that can cause asthma. Factory farms are disposing of the waste near homes where residents describe it as an odd smelling substance that can cause asthma over time. Overall , factory farming does not only harm animals but humans as well.
When we look at the clothes that are overpriced, we look at the life of an innocent and its life that was taken away. According to Sentient Media, “ combining land animals and marine life, over 2 trillion animals are killed every single year for food. That doesn’t include the number of animals killed for their fur and skin”. It is a luxury to own fur not a necessity, by using animals for our outfits we are causing extinctions on animals such as rabbits, foxes, seals, and many others. They are hunted down and killed inhumanely for those who can afford it. A human life should have no price, animals have the same capability we do to feel pain. We take advantage of their innocence, simply for a product that doesn’t have to be real fur. Many companies replicate animal fur, saving a life at a time.
In final analysis, animals need rights to protect them from the suffrage they are exposed to daily. It is inhumane to keep treating them the same way, our society is selfish for continuing to believe that animals don’t matter. Every creature has the will to live a painful life without suffrage. It is not a matter of animals having the same rights as humans but reassuring that they are protected. As Singer, Peter says, “basic principles of equality does not require equal or identical treatment; it requires equal consideration.” Consideration is what society needs the most, we need to feel for all the animals we have caused great suffering. Currently their is a few laws that are intitled to help animal cruelty but do so little to protect their lives. It is sad to see how far our society has come for the benefit of ourselves . It is urgent we change things, from our viewpoints to the matter of how we handle situations.
