Should animal testing for cosmetic be banned?
Right now, millions of mice, rats, rabbits, primates, cats, dogs, and other animals are locked inside cold, barren cages in laboratories across the country. They weaken in pain, ache with loneliness, and long to roam free and use their minds.
Instead, all they can do is sit and wait in fear of the next terrifying and painful procedure that will be performed on them. The stress, infertility and boredom causes some animals to develop anxious behaviours such constantly spinning in circles, rocking back and forth and even pulling out their own hair and biting their own skin. They shake and shrink in fear whenever someone walks past their cages and their blood pressure spikes radically. After enduring lives of pain, loneliness and terror, almost all of them will be killed.
Animal testing for cosmetics is the cause of this unjust crisis. Does the world honestly need another eyeliner, lipstick or foundation so badly that it should come at the expense of animals' lives?
The thought of dripping chemicals into a rabbit's eyes for the sake of a product like mascara or eye liner is awful. So it's not surprising that many people assume selling products tested this way would already be illegal in Australia. Sadly, that is not quite the case.
While strict state regulations in Australia mean that in effect animal testing of finished cosmetics does not happen here, there is still no federal law that clearly bans it and imported products or ingredients tested on animals can still be sold in Australia. Many everyday well-known brands and products sold in our department stores and supermarkets are still being tested on animals overseas.
Millions of animals every year suffer and die in painful cosmetics tests. Exact numbers aren't available because mice, rats, birds, and cold-blooded animals, who make up more than 95% of animals used in experiments, are not covered by the minimal protections of the Animal Welfare Act and therefore go uncounted. To test cosmetics, hundreds of thousands of animals are poisoned, blinded, and killed every year by cruel cosmetic companies. Many of these tests are not even required by law, and they often produce inaccurate results. Even if a product harms animals, it can still be marketed to consumers.
The federal government and many health charities waste precious dollars from taxpayers and generous donors on cruel and misleading animal experiments at private laboratories instead of spending them on promising clinical, in epidemiological studies that are actually relevant to humans.
Animal testing for cosmetics is not only expensive but is also simply wasteful. 92% of experimental products that are effective in animals fail in human clinical trials because they are too dangerous or don’t work. Animal experiments prolong the suffering of people waiting for effective products by misleading experimenters and wasted precious money, time and resources that could have been spent on human-relevant research.
There are already many alternatives to animals which have been developed. As hard as it is to believe, animal experiments for cosmetics continue even though non-animal tests are widely available. Instead of measuring how long it takes a chemical to burn away the cornea of a rabbit's eye, manufacturers can now drop that chemical onto cornea-like 3-D tissue structures produced from human
