Animal Testing Inaccurate

Animal Testing Over 100 million animals are brutally killed by cosmetic or medical experiments every year. Rats, rabbits dogs, cats, mice, and many other animals have chemicals purposely rubbed in their eyes or on their skin just to see if a product is safe to use on humans. So many animals are test subjects in the United States each year for products that aren’t even necessary. Sure, lots of women (and men) like wearing makeup, but it is not an absolute necessity. Only 2% of human diseases occur naturally in animals, so researchers have to find ways to give animals an artificial disease. In some cases like this, scientists fake heart disease in animals by tightening a wire around one of the coronary arteries. They have also found ways to …show more content…
In these experiments, animals have substances either injected into their tissue or forced in their mouth until half of them die. This usually takes around 200 animals for one experiment. This lets scientists know how large of a dose is toxic to half of the population of animals. The LD50 test is inaccurate because the amount of a substance, such as a pesticide, that kills a mouse has no correlation with the amount that would kill a human being. The surroundings of the animals are additional factors to determine death rate. One study proved that more rats died in the summer than the winter. Another one showed that almost all of the tested mice died when the experiment was performed in a crowded cage whereas almost no mice died with the same dosage in less populated cages. Also, in the amount of time it takes to perform an experiment, many animals could die of different causes. These experiments are also very costly and take years to produce results. They can last two to five years and cost up to $2 million per test. Another common cosmetic test is the Draize test, where animals have harmful substances rubbed into their eyes. This can cause animals to go blind, or even die. These tests are normally performed on rabbits because they have particularly sensitive eyes. The substance is put only into one eye of an animal, so differences can be observed …show more content…
There are thousands of chemicals that are deemed safe to be used in cosmetics such as shampoo, body wash, lotion, and makeup. Although these ingredients may have been proven safe by animal tests in the past, using them prevents more animals from being test subjects in the future. Many cosmetic brands - around 1,700 to be more exact - have found other ways to ensure product safety without using animals. Another alternative is using in vitro methods where experiments are performed in an artificial environment, such as a test tube. “Rather than hoping that an animal will respond like a human, in vitro research is conducted in an external, controlled environment, such as a test tube or a petri dish” (“Humane” n.p.). Cells from human donors are placed in test tubes, and the substance to be tested is put on them to test irritancy and see if any cells die in the process. If so, then the chemical is obviously unsafe. In vitro tests are not only less harmful to animals, but they are more time efficient, less expensive, and three times more accurate than animal testing. Another alternative to medicinal animal testing is microdosing, where a human volunteer is given an extremely low dose of a drug to study its effects on the cellular level, without affecting the whole body and its other systems. This technique isn’t widely popular, but it is cost-efficient because of the microscopic