Dear Future President,

A wise man once said “the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated,” (Gandhi). How great is our country when we test on animals? Millions of animals are being harmed, killed, and locked up every day. Animal testing is relied on for cosmetics, food, drugs, chemicals, and other products, it has become a problem, and it is too much money. Human and animal bodies don’t all work the same way. Some of the things that scientists test are not even going to be used. Animal testing should stop because it is costing too much, it’s ethically wrong, and it is medically proven that a large percentage of all testing conducted provides inaccurate concluding information.

In 2011, 11.5 million animals were used for animal testing in Europe alone. PETA has predicted over 100 million animals are tested all around the world. Only 5% of animal testing is documented. No matter what the experiment is, it’s still legal. No matter how cruel, irrelevant to science advancement, human health, or painful. They can do anything they want to an animal. For example, scientists could just take off a limb to study how they would react. They are deprived of socialization and psychologically traumatized. They aren’t allowed to communicate with others, and they’re beaten and starved. They’re traumatized. Some animals are put onto a painful chemical drug to keep them quiet and paralyzed. They are tortured and killed slowly.

“Ninety percent of experimental drugs that are safe and effective in animals fail in human clinical trial because they don’t work or are dangerous” (PETA). A former National Cancer Institute Director, Dr. Richard Klausner says that they have been curing mice for years. Despite the fact that it works on them, it simply just does not work on humans. Diseases that are artificially induced in animals in a laboratory, whether they be mice or monkeys, are never identical to those that occur naturally in human beings. Animal species differ from one another biologically in many significant ways. It becomes even more unlikely that an animal experiments will yield that will be correctly interpreted and applied to the human condition in a meaningful way. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has stated, “Currently, nine out of ten experimental drugs fail in clinical studies because we cannot accurately predict how they will behave in people based on laboratory and animal studies.”

We are destroying our environment by testing on animals. Testing takes a lot of resources, and those resources to be disposed. According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare, “A research animal facility generates a significant amount of waste that must be removed and disposed of on a regular, frequent basis”. Things such as food, caging, chemicals, excrement, bedding, waste feed, needles, syringes, unused or expired medications and drugs, and other supplies and equipment. These things contribute to water and air pollution.

Rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, rats and mice are tested on for cosmetics every year. More than 100,000 animals are sentenced to suffering and death all around the world (Fact sheet: Cosmetic Testing). Products that are considered cosmetics by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is anything that “intended to be applied to the human body for cleansing, beautifying, promoting attractiveness, or altering the appearance without affecting the body's structure or functions”. Dogs and monkeys are not used for cosmetics, but they are used to test other types of chemicals.

On the other hand, animal testing has gotten us farther in science and medicine. A disease by the name of polio killed thousands of people in the early 1940’s. Animal testing helped create a vaccine called inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV), around the 1950-60. Around 7% of the population have diabetes. To figure out diabetes, scientists researched on dogs. Without that, we wouldn’t know much about their blood sugar, and more people could have died.

We do owe our good health to past investigators and the animals they studied. Nevertheless, we should decide if we want to continue this morally wrong way. We should keep in mind the future generations who will look back at us and ask if we acted wisely. Just remember, we can’t be a great country if we don’t treat our animals correctly.

Sincerely,

Abbie Plantz

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