Every year, millions of animals are poisoned, blinded, and killed in crude tests to evaluate the toxicity of consumer products and their ingredients. Rats, mice, guinea pigs, rabbits, and other animals are forced to swallow or inhale huge quantities of a test substance or endure the pain of a chemical eating away at their sensitive eyes and skin .

But the suffering and death of these animals is entirely unnecessary in the making of products like your shampoo, eye shadow, and toilet cleaner. No law requires animal testing of cosmetics or personal care and household cleaning products, so manufacturers of these products have no excuse for inflicting suffering on animals. Companies that test these types of products on animals should be boycotted until they change to a non-animal-testing policy.

You may think companies that test on animals do so for your safety, but these tests usually aren’t reliable in determining a chemical’s effect on humans. Reactions can vary greatly from species to species so it is quite difficult to come to any conclusions about what a substance will do to humans by testing it on a rabbit. In fact, a product that made a test animal go blind could still be sold to you. In addition to being cruel and unreliable, animal tests also tend to be more expensive than alternative methods, making them both unkind and inefficient.

Many of the companies that manufacture cosmetics and household-products have turned their backs on animal testing in favour of the various non-animal test methods available today. These include human cell cultures and tissue studies (in vitro tests) and artificial human “skin” and “eyes” that mimic the body’s natural properties, and a number of computer virtual organs that serve as accurate models of human body parts. One example are EPISKIN™ and EpiDerm™, multi-layered skin models made up of cultures of human skin cells, which have been scientifically validated and accepted around the world as total replacements for rabbit skin corrosion studies.¹

The best ways to pressure companies to give up animal testing is to boycott their products. Let the lists of Companies That Do Test on Animals and Companies That Don’t Test on Animals be your guide and start shopping kindly.

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