I have always loved animals and enjoyed going to the zoo since I was little. However, as I grew older I have noticed that the life of an animal is actually not so easy and that it’s not just how adorable they are but it is filled with abuse and sometimes even death. In this small website, I want to talk about the issue of animal abuse/testing and what we could do to save these poor animals.
Think about a circus and how fun it is to go and watch it with your family from when you were small. One thing that I remembered from when I went to the circus is the elephants and the bears that were there, as I was always an animal lover. Though it looks fun and happy, the lives of those animals are at risk every single day. For example, those bears that were balancing on colorful balls were trained to stand on their hind legs from the day they were born. Since they were cubs they would have a rope around their neck that forces them to stand up and if they don’t they would end up choking and dying.
Over the years, rabbits have been used in the Draize Eye and Skin tests. Made in the 1940s, these tests involve holding rabbits in full body restraints so that chemicals can be dripped in their eye or spread on their shaved and scraped the skin. The restraint stops the animals from pawing at their eyes or back to relieve the discomfort and so interfere with the experiment. It is also extremely unpleasant and painful, causing eye reddening, swelling, ulceration, even blindness, or skin cracking and bleeding.
Thirty adult dogs, six puppies, two cats, and two parrots were rescued from the horrific conditions in which a former Crufts winner was keeping them (Crufts is a dog competition held in the United Kingdom). The article from RSPCA was “Inside conditions were indescribable, with the lack of ventilation the stench of urine and feces was overwhelming. Ten dogs were confined in crates, some of which were stacked on top of each other, without food or access to water. They all appeared scared and depressed, and those away from the window had no natural light.” They even state that the veterans were in tears seeing the animal’s conditions.
Here is a story about Rabbit 32*. He is one of more than 170,000 rabbits who will be killed in U.S. laboratories this year for cruel experiments and product testing. Here in the laboratory, bunnies like him don’t get real names, just numbers. That’s because the humans who experiment on them think of us as tools—not animals with feelings. Experimenters like using them in their painful experiments because they are small, gentle, and easy to handle. There’s no law that says these products need to be tested on animals, but lots of companies, like Johnson & Johnson and Avon, still pay for painful tests on animals for their products. Chemical companies test on animals as well. The law should respect animals and make these painful and deadly tests illegal.
Next time you visit the circus or the zoo, imagine the pain that they have been through to be where they are. As an animal lover, I have promised myself to not visit those sights again because then I would be giving the abusers the money that they wanted. Also, next time you go to the makeup store to buy some mascara check if it is cruelty-free. We do not want any more animals suffering just like the billions that are grieving right at this moment.