• Question: Where do you stand on animals used to test cosmetics?

    Asked by anon-217276 to Savannah, Philippe, Lucy, Joanna, Harrison, Edoardo on 12 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Savannah Clawson

      Savannah Clawson answered on 12 Jun 2019:

      Generally, I think we should avoid using animals to test on wherever possible. Cosmetics are not an essential item and therefore, I think we should try to avoid animal testing in this scenario. Most companies are starting to move away from animal testing and lots of others are completely against it, e.g. Lush. However, I think the problem is a little more complicated when we start to consider essential items such as medicine. There are a lot of ethical issues involved with medicine trials and all medicines have to go through a lot of tests before they are allowed to even be tried on humans. This often involves testing on animals. In an ideal world it would be great if we never had to test on animals but, in my personal opinion, I think animal testing is often necessary in medicine.

    • Photo: Harrison Prosper

      Harrison Prosper answered on 12 Jun 2019:

      Answer this question: would you be happy using your cat to test whether or not a bunch of chemicals destined for cosmetics are safe? I would not. For developing drugs for serious human diseases, we may have no choice to use our fellow animals, but that should occur only if there is absolutely no alternative and even then a strong case must be made why one set of animals should suffer in order to help another set of animals (us).

    • Photo: Joanna Huang

      Joanna Huang answered on 14 Jun 2019:

      I am not a supporter of this! Animal testing is a grey area and involves a lot of back and forth in terms of ethics. As Savannah and Harrison have already said, only when it is necessary and there are no other alternatives (e.g. testing for a new cancer treatment) and when the outcome of testing will contribute towards the development of crucial drugs for illnesses should animal testing be used. Though I think that precautions should still be taken, and that consequences of testing should be minimized as much as possible.

    • Photo: Philippe Gambron

      Philippe Gambron answered on 18 Jun 2019:

      We treat animal in an appalling way either for experimentation or for meat consumption. We should not do so because they are sentient being who have affective needs similar as our. They can feel pain, sadness or, on the contrary, feel comfortable or soothed. We should not ignore that. I understand that, in some cases, it is necessary to test some drugs on animals. For example, if we want to test a cure for cancer, selfishly for humans, we will prefer to test it first on animal rather than to start killing randomly patients because the drug does not work. However, cosmetics are not necessary and they don’t justify the suffering of animals.

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