causes a typically slow, grisly death for over 20 million animals in the United States every year. Animals are used for a variety of purposes, for example they may be forced to ingest lethal quantities of a chemical substance or have debilitating injuries done to them, and then be dissected. Animals are still used for cosmetics and household products testing by many companies, and many are used in bizarre and pointless psychological experiments. The wastefulness of many of these experiments would be almost laughable if not for the suffering they caused – one researcher at a large university has spent over a decade sewing shut the eyes of infant primates under the guise of studying blindness in human beings. A major juice company spent millions of dollars on lethal tests on rabbits and other animals in attempt to prove that fruit is healthy.

Animal rights activists are not alone in their opposition to vivisection. A growing number of the scientific community, individuals with incurable illnesses, and people from all walks of life doubt the validity of animal research as a reputable method of gathering information about illness, disease, and the human anatomy. Animals of a different species are significantly different in their biology and physiology, and as a result many products tested safe on animals have gone on to kill or seriously injure human beings. By the research industry’s own estimates, the results of testing a product on animals is less than 50% likely to predict the effects of the same product on human beings. In other words, it would be just as effective to flip a coin as to conduct painful animal tests. Furthermore, by the industry’s own figures over 95% of products tested “safe” on animals are eventually discarded as dangerous or unnecessary for human beings. Cancer has been cured over two dozen times in mice, but we are as animal testing has been a keystone of cancer research we are no closer to a cure now than we were twenty years ago.

Many large pharmaceutical companies use animal testing as a shield against patient lawsuits. If a drug turns out to kill or seriously injure human beings, the company can – and in many court cases successfully has – pointed to animal research that “proved” the drug safe in order to avoid financial liability. In fact, the fourth leading cause of hospitalization in the United States – one in every seven patients – is adverse reactions to prescription drugs that had been deemed “safe” by animal tests. The leading causes of death in this country – smoking, heart disease, and cancer

All of this testing is occurring at the same time as major scientific advances provide more and more accurate alternatives to animal testing. While the number of alternative methods is too lengthy to go into here, much more information is easily available online. If you are against the testing of cosmetics, personal household products, and other tests on animals, click here to found out which companies do and do not test on animals. Please shop cruelty-free for the animals’ sake!

"I abhor vivisection. It should at least be curbed. Better it should be abolished. I know of no achievement through vivisection, no scientific discovery that could not have been obtained without such barbarism and cruelty. The whole thing is evil." —Charles W. Mayo, MD (1961), son of the co-founder of the Mayo Clinic

"The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse... We have cured mice of cancer for decades -- and it simply didn't work in humans."
— Dr. Richard Klausner, Director of the National Cancer Institute

"During my medical education... I found vivisection horrible, barbarous and above all unnecessary." — Carl Jung, MD