Dear President,

I am writing to you on behalf of large percentile of the United States taken up by our animal friends. But are they really our friends? I don’t know about you, but my friends wouldn’t cage me up my whole life and stick needles in my eye for their own personal benefit.

Basically the point I am so briefly trying to get across is the fact that what you are allowing to happen to animals in this country is wrong. Instead of torturing animals and taking their lives to find cures that are proven not to work on humans, the United States should be funding more productive and humane ways to conduct experiments. Over 100 million animals are killed in the U.S. for food, drug, and cosmetic testing every year. If the animals are not killed, they are forced to inhale toxic fumes, immobilized in restraint devices for hours, get holes drilled in their skulls, their skin burned off, their spinal cords crushed, and become socially isolated in barren cages, causing them to be psychologically traumatized. A Pew research poll from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PETA, the largest animal rights organization in the world, shows that a shocking 43% of people are opposed to animal experimentation. However, those who aren’t opposed only support the testing of animals because they were led to believe that it is necessary for human health. It’s not. National Cancer Institute Director Dr. Richard Klausner said himself “We have cured mice of cancer for decades, and it simply didn’t work on humans.” So no matter how much we perfect these treatments on the poor animals, no matter how many of their lives we take, no matter how much money we put into the research and testing, they simply don’t have the same DNA as us. So it will not work. According to NEAVS, a national program founded to in 1895 to end all animal testing in the United States, even though 85 HIV/AIDS vaccines have worked on primates, every one of nearly 200 preventative and therapeutic vaccine trials have failed to demonstrate benefit in humans.

It just doesn’t make sense to me why the government would condone such inhumane actions and put so much money into these actions, when they’re not even beneficial for our sake. It’s honestly a waste of money and I am sure I am not the only one who feels this way. Why not put this money towards more research and better equipment to test new remedies and medicines and cosmetics on man made organisms? Why take living things out of their homes and away from the natural state they were meant to be in? By taking these animals out of their environment in the first place it’s even damaging the food chain and ecosystem they were in prior to being abducted, so it’s not just the animals being taken that are being affected, it’s all of the animals and plants around them as well.

It’s not just in tucked away labs in the middle of nowhere either, animal experimentation is happening all around us, even in my own school. We constructed a beehive in our library to observe, but all of the bees became infected with dysentery and died; we just watched. We watched all of them die. That is so wrong, bees are on the extinction watch list, yet we are still take them for our own personal reasons.

If all of this information isn’t enough to spark some thought on a better and more ethical way to conduct lab research in the United States, I will leave you with this. Go to any website about animal experimentation that lists pros and cons, any one at all, read through the pros and cons, and you will see that one side clearly outweighs the other. Type in animal testing and click on the pictures, the really gruesome ones, see what they are doing here in our very own country. The country houses the land of the free and the home of the brave. Do the right thing, be the brave and let them free.

Sincerely,

A kid who cares