What is a topic that is used everyday, often overlooked, and inhumane? Animal testing; a cringeworthy subject that is seen as completely normal because of its popular use. Sure, animal testing is bad, but not that many companies test on them, right? Wrong. Animal testing is an inhumane technique that is used by almost all major brand companies, and results in over 100 million animals being tortured and killed every year. Surely there are many other humane, cheaper, and more ecofriendly alternatives to testing product usage and quality.

Animal testing has been proven to be not fully effective, more expensive, and the tests often are inaccurate. Dr. Christopher P. Austin from PETA says “Traditional animal testing is time-consuming, expensive, and from a scientific perspective the results do not necessarily translate to humans.” Millions of dollars are spent on testing animals, and the results are not relevant to humans because mice, rabbits, dogs, and chimpanzees are simply not humans. Therefore, they will not react the same as humans do; so why are innocent animal lives being wasted when the results do not even “translate” to humans? Furthermore, animals do not get the same diseases as humans. (PETA Association)  An article from Huffpost Science states that “not only do animal models fail to help us better understand human diseases, they often lead us down the wrong path of investigation.” The article also discussed a study on diabetes, and the search to cure it in mice first before trying it on humans. The research concluded that the function of the human pancreatic cell is “dramatically different” than any rodent, and therefore cannot give reliable results to the research. (Huffpost Science) In a recent PETA2 article, research shows that less than 2% of human diseases occur in animals. It also states “according to the former scientific executive of Huntingdon Life Sciences, animal tests and human results agree “5%-25% of the time.’ ‘92% of drugs passed by animal tests immediately fail when first tried on humans because they’re useless, dangerous or both’”. This shows how unnecessary animal testing has proven to be in relevance to human needs. Every animal has its different effects just like humans have different reactions to products, too. In fact, 70% of birth defects are sustainable to monkeys than they are in humans. This goes to prove the fact that 98% of animal testing is not accurate and has no correlation to the human species. (PETA 2)

To add on, animal testing is incredibly expensive. As surprising as it is, the federal government spends the most money on animal testing overall. The government spends 14.5 billion dollars annually, on average. The United States alone spends 16 billion dollars annually, using taxpayers’ money to test on animals. The bulk of animal testing is in the medicinal aspect. In fact, The U.S. National Institutes of Health spends 13 billion dollars annually; being the world’s largest company alone that uses animal experimentation. Medical animal testing combined spends 25 billion dollars a year. Top brand companies like Clorox, Estee Lauder, Colgate, and MAC cosmetics all spends billions of dollars every year on animal experimentation. How do they afford to spend billions? Solely from the people who buy their products. Indeed, the sad truth is that by purchasing from these everyday brands, you support and fund animal laboratory testing. (CHANGE Association)
Animal experiments can benefit humans in minor ways. Testing is most commonly used for medical reasons. Mice and other rodents are often used for curing diseases such as cancer and diabetes. In fact, cancer has been cured in mice, but the results do not translate to humans. Animal testing can almost be used as a precaution for humans: is this chemical dangerous to a living thing? Testing can eliminate the worst chemicals and products. While testing can be beneficial in some aspects, the negatives outweigh the positives.

What can be done to help stop animal testing? Simply not buying from these companies will damage the businesses financially. As stated earlier, there are eco-friendly alternatives to animal testing. Many brands have quality products at affordable prices, who do not support animal experimentation. Brands like Lush, Bath & Body Works, and Trader Joe's are 100% cruelty free. By supporting these companies, you help reduce the unnecessary need for killing millions of animals a year. Animal testing is slowly started to decrease, and will hopefully be completely stopped in the future years. Experimenting on animals is cruel, unethical, inaccurate, expensive, and majorly hurts the environment. The hope is that the animal deaths per year will slowly decrease from billions down to millions, until animal testing is finally stopped.  As PETA famously says, “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way.” (PETA)