Cosmetics (such as shampoo, deodorant and lipstick), household products (such as dish soap, laundry detergent and glass cleaner), and some medical drugs are tested on animals rather than humans. Because animals that are used as test subjects are very similar to humans genetically, this means that they are susceptible to many of the same health problems as humans (cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc.). But what about the ethical side of this method? Are we harming animals for no reason?
First of all, besides from the cosmetics or household products, medical drugs are needed for us. And we must test them before they are released to the usage of public. The reason of this is medicines are able to become a risk when the dosage or the sterilization isn’t controlled. So we should test these drugs on some living things so animals are the best option for us. This shouldn’t be understood as a animal genocide, if you are building a civilization and became the most powerful specie in the world, you need to be able to sacrifice some ethics to move on. Because we have a standart, if we don’t test them, there could be more issues that will cause sick people to die when they needed their medication.
In fact, this situation is actually more ethic than it sounds, because if we look into the records of the experiments, animals that used are mostly old or near death. And the test is about drugs, so the subjects are already sick and would probably die. This is actually not bad if we look at the condition of sick animals, because we are reducing the diseased ones so the rate of the cronic diseases among the animals reduces too.
But there is another option for these tests, as technology moves forward, there is a less and less need for animal experimentation. Human genes cloned into microorganisms can yield more specific toxicology results, for example, than simply administering toxins to animals. While much scientific research cannot be adequately done without animals, commercial safety testing, such as by cosmetics companies, is increasingly being done without the use of animals. Meanwhile, improving the well-being of laboratory animals, such as providing an “enriched environment” for rats rather than keeping them isolated in traditional lab cages, can do much to ease the suffering of animals used in research.
To conclude, using animals on these experiments is not that bad but as humanity improves new solutions it is more moral to stop this cruelty. Because there is no need to use and harm animals for no reason if we have other ways to achieve our goal.