China: Stop Requiring Animal Testing

Animal testing is a very barbaric, misleading and shockingly violent practice. It is responsible for what could very well be one of the top five highest scales of animal suffering that the world has ever known.

In the UK, at least at one point, it was legal for vivisectors (scientists who experiment on animals) to cut animals open, cut off their limbs, infect them with deadly diseases, forcibly pour poisons down their throats, forcibly hold them against hot plates, gas them and/or shoot them, in amongst other obscenities. My point here is that, if this sort thing could ever go on in the UK, can you possibly imagine what horrors could go on in the animal labs of China, which has one of the world's worst records of animal cruelty as a country?

Animals do have souls, and they can also be surprisingly intelligent and even somewhat human by nature. Time after time have dogs been known to save lives, sometimes even little or no special training. Horses, cats, foxes, apes, dolphins, wolves, goats, pigs and whales are amongst the many species of animal that have been known to save lives - whether human or animal - at at least one point in the past.

Also, can you come up with an explanation for how sheepdogs work or even how ordinary dogs are trained, and how some are easier to train than others, without using at least one reference to their intelligence? Also, would you be able to sniff out a criminal or a missing person solely by smelling just one piece of their clothing? Would you be able to hunt and stalk prey in exactly the same way as a cat would?

Would you be able to swing through the trees like an orang-utan or learn to walk and even run at little more than a few hours of age? These are all skills that certain animals can often learn with ease, and that's if they even need to learn them at all.

Animal testing can also be bad for people, as well as animals. It can produce misleading results as animals have different bodies and genetic systems from human beings. For instance, morphine makes cats stay awake, but it makes human beings go to sleep. Also, chimpanzees are immune to HIV and Malaria and being forced to smoke cigarettes for months on end did not cause lung cancer in dogs. Believe it or not, Thalidomide was declared "safe" after it had been tested on animals, but it still went on to cause birth defects when humans started taking it.

There are now a great many alternatives to animal testing. Fake organs, fake skin, computer models, studies of real-life people, cell research, donated body parts and human volunteers can all now be used instead. Plus, many of these alternatives may actually produce more accurate, more useful and less dangerous results than experiments done on animals.