Exposing Animal Testing: A Protest Performance

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Imagine a baby bunny being trapped in a cage for the entirety of its life, be it sixty years or sixty minutes. Imagine the bunny being constantly poked, prodded and injected with an unknown drug ten to fifteen times a day. Jacqueline Traide, an artist, subjected herself to this type of treatment to give a voice to voiceless victims. To demonstrate the torture these victims are subjected to, Traide was force-fed and injected with cosmetics in a popular mall in the United Kingdom as part of a protest against animal testing. During her protest Traide endured shocking treatment in front of hundreds of shoppers to raise awareness and end the use of animals in research. Protests similar to this one gained the attention activists craved; animal testing …show more content…

The focus of animal testing varies depending on the curiosity of scientists, done with little regard for the feelings or rights of animals. The majority of animals are euthanized after being used in an experiment. They are no longer useful to scientists after a failed experiment. The Animal Welfare Act (AWA) is a regulatory law that tries to control who is allowed to own or use certain animals for experimentation and the living conditions of the animals. One of the biggest criticisms of the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) is the exclusion of rats and mice, which make up the majority of the animals used in research (“Animal Testing”) These animals are mistreated and abused without protection from the AWA. An example of animal abuse within laboratories is the Draize eye test. This test involves rabbits in cages with their eyelids held open by clamps; this tactic eliminates the rabbits’ ability to blink away the products being tested. The Draize eye test is used by cosmetics companies to measure the level of irritation caused by their products. What experiments and tests similar to this one show is that “federally funded animal research centers around the United States have little regard for or understanding of the animals they experiment on. Any abuse is allowed in the name of science” (Cothran 2). The opposing side …show more content…

Scientists agree that micro-dosing can be used instead of animal testing, but also claim that micro-dosing can not predict toxicity or side effects that occur at higher doses (Hunnicutt 2). They also believe that in vitro testing cannot replace animal testing altogether because while the drug might work fine on a cell in a test tube, the researchers question how it will work in a body. The supporters of animal testing fail to realize that all of the alternatives can be used and will produce similar, and more reliable outcomes for medicine than animal

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