By Neal Barnard, MD on December 13, 2010
As the new year begins, Congress will take up the thorny issue of animal testing. A proposed bill, the Safe Cosmetics Act, would require that cosmetics and their ingredients undergo extensive toxicity tests, many of which will involve animals.
The ethical issues around animal testing are obvious – should we really be killing animals for the newest holiday-scented lotion?
These tests can be profoundly inhumane. The Draize eye test, for example, involves smearing a substance into the eyes of a restrained rabbit. Rabbits are used in part because they don’t shed tears and therefore can’t wash the irritating substance from their eyes. Developmental toxicity tests done in rats and rabbits involve feeding ingredients to pregnant animals. Then, when the babies are born, they are dissected.
There are also scientific issues with animal testing. Data from animal tests does not reliably predict human health effects. In addition, many animal tests take years to complete and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. A single developmental toxicity test, for example, can use up to 1,400 animals and is highly unreliable as a predictor of human health because rabbits’ placentas are very different from those of humans.
The Safe Cosmetics Act would require that millions of cosmetics ingredients be tested for numerous health effects that could occur at various life stages and levels of exposure. Given the time and cost of animal tests, it is simply impossible to meet the testing requirements of this bill using traditional animal methods.
There is a solution. Cell- and computer-based methods can provide more accurate data on a greater number of human health effects. And these methods are much faster and more affordable than traditional animal-based methods, making it possible to assess infinitely more cosmetics and ingredients.
The Safe Cosmetics Act does encourage the development of new methods, and it includes a promising section on animal testing alternatives, which supports the use of non-animal testing methods where available and effective. But the bill must take an even stronger stance in favor of modern science to meet the goal of better human health protection.
My organization, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), is working to ensure that new cosmetics-testing legislation includes additional provisions to support the development and use of further non-animal test methods.
To foster the scientific advancements necessary for reliable and timely assessment of potential health hazards posed by cosmetics, Congress should provide funding and incentives for the development and use of cell and computational methods.
PCRM is pushing for commonsense safety testing by urging legislators to support testing tailored to an ingredient, rather than a one-size-fits-all checklist of tests. In addition, PCRM scientists are calling for a mandate that the Food and Drug Administration and cosmetics companies consider all existing data on an ingredient to determine whether additional information is needed.
PCRM is also encouraging lawmakers to follow the approach taken by the European Union (EU) by banning the testing of cosmetics on animals. The EU ban, along with significant government funding and support for method development, has driven remarkable technical innovations.
Non-animal cosmetics testing would save millions of animals’ lives, and it would help make sure that cranberry spice body wash is free of harmful ingredients.
For more information on PCRM’s chemical policy work, click here.
Photo Credit: Horia Varlan
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By Wayne Pacelle on October 12, 2010
In June 2010, the Environmental Defense Fund and its partners in the campaign to reform U.S. law to regulate chemicals made an impassioned plea for American consumers not to be treated like “guinea pigs.” I’d like to remind our friends and colleagues in the environmental and consumer protection communities that advocates for animal protection – while respecting the interests of all animals and believing that none of them should be treated like disposable lab equipment – also care about protecting human health and the environment, and that we all must work together to achieve a future that is both safer and more humane.
It goes without saying that informed decisions regarding chemical safety cannot be made without adequate information (including testing to detect hazardous properties, and information concerning the levels to which humans and wildlife may be exposed). However, simply calling for more data is not the answer; it is also vital that the inadequacies of the current testing paradigm be acknowledged and overcome.
Today’s chemical testing entails animal poisoning studies, most of which were designed decades ago, and which tell us a lot about how large doses of single chemicals affect small animals with short life spans, but very little about how mixtures of chemicals at typically low exposure levels affect larger, longer-living human beings. A rat force fed a chemical for his or her three-year life – often causing painful symptoms such as tumors and organ failure – cannot reliably predict the effects of a human lifetime’s worth of low-level exposure to a “cocktail” of environmental chemicals, which is the situation we’re faced with in the real world.
Animal tests are expensive and time consuming, and their relevance is often questioned by stakeholders on one side or the other. This leads to disputes over which chemicals represent a real threat, and a seemingly bottomless pit of animal testing to “prove” that a chemical is harmful or safe. (Remember the decades-long battle over whether cigarette smoking causes cancer? Today, history is repeating itself with Bisphenol A and other chemicals.) Even in optimum conditions, regulating chemicals on the basis of animal data takes years, and relies heavily on guesswork and unproven assumptions. And at the end of all that, the results can still – rightly – be called into question.
So instead of dealing with chemical safety and animal suffering as two separate issues, The Human Society of the United States (HSUS) and its affiliates are addressing the “guinea pig” problem with one ambitious project.
In 2007, the National Academy of Sciences published a report titled “Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century: A Vision and a Strategy.” In it, a team of eminent scientists (including HSUS staff member Martin Stephens, PhD) established two guiding principles: first, animal testing is of limited value in predicting real-life human health effects of chemicals or for dealing with the current backlog of tens of thousands of chemicals that are being inadequately regulated; and second, a new approach – a paradigm shift – is needed. The Academy advocates moving away from conventional animal test requirements toward a combination of modern computer-based and human-relevant systems biology approaches that can deliver results in days rather than years, and at a small fraction of the cost of animal testing. In fact, many of the participating scientists envision the complete replacement of animal tests, and see this work as prompting a long overdue, and desperately needed, revolution in the regulation of chemicals.
The Human Toxicology Project we are promoting in the United States and globally is, like the Human Genome Project before it, a solution-oriented scientific program that will overhaul the current antiquated testing paradigm so we are no longer treated as guinea pigs – and neither are guinea pigs. It will prevent the horrible effects of testing toxic chemicals on millions of animals, greatly advance our understanding of the effects of chemicals on human biology, and lead to more reliable risk assessment decisions.
Photo Credit: MJames
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By Guest Blogger on July 20, 2009
This Meatless Monday, we are so excited to bring you an interview with Shaun Monson. Monson’s writer/filmmaker credits include the award-winning documentary Earthlings, which focuses on the suffering of animals used for food, fashion, pets, entertainment and medical research. He is currently working on Unity, volume two of the Earthlings trilogy. (For more information, visit www.earthlings.com, www.unitythemovie.com).
The first five readers to tweet Kris_Carr with the link to this blog, will receive a free copy of Earthlings!
1. What was the inspiration behind Earthlings?
I got the idea because I was filming public service announcements on spaying and neutering pets, so it started with domestic animals. When they were killed on the street or euthanized in the shelters, they were put into this room that’s essentially a big refrigerator. When I saw the animals piled up in there, it made me think of meat, and it got me thinking of cows and pigs and chickens. That was the beginning of Earthlings really, the first spark of inspiration.
2. Is it difficult to get people to watch it?
It’s challenging material. There’s a quote by the late actress and activist Gretchen Wyler, who worked with the Humane Society for years: “We must not refuse with our eyes what they must endure with their bodies.”
When people think they can’t watch it, I always say, “I understand,” and tell them how hard it’s been getting anybody to look at it. I talk about the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which means the government can imprison people if they cost a corporation money through certain types of animal activism.
When I tell people this side, they become more curious, because they feel their freedom is being taken away. So instead of telling them what they should do, I empathize. I’ll give them a DVD, which may sit by their TV for a while. Maybe they’ll come around to it. I am of the opinion that we should never force these things. If you force activism on people when they’re not there yet in their hearts, they’ll slip back into doing things their old way.
3. In Earthlings you say “Make the Connection.” What is that connection? What do you wish people would understand?
I hope people can “make the connection” between all expressions of life – human, animal, tree, because we all share the same planet, and one life form is connected to another. One thing Earthlings shows is animals clearly experience fear and pain, as do humans. When we use them, we are causing them tremendous fear and pain, right up until their death. So we ask people to make that connection between animal products they use, how they are obtained, and so on.
4. What do you say to people who say that animal research is worth it if it finds life-saving cures for people?
It is a speciesist argument, and it’s dualistic – one species must suffer for another to flourish. We need to get beyond this perception. The majority of animal experimentation is done for personal or household products, like cosmetics and cleaners. It’s no sacrifice to buy cruelty-free soap. What’s challenging is questioning the belief system about the medical world. Animal experimentation is rarely done to find cures, it’s for drugs to alleviate symptoms. It’s a law that pharmaceuticals be tested on animals before any human trials, so it’s primarily done because it’s the law, not because it assures that drugs are safe. There are scientific limitations of animal experimentation in terms of human biology. Even the most basic observations illustrate this. My dogs drink out of the gutter. If I did that, I’d be sick to my stomach.
Organizations like PCRM do extraordinary work on alternatives to animal experimentation that are far more effective and more sophisticated. This is the kind of research people interested in life-saving cures should be promoting.
5. What advice do you have for people just starting out on a vegan lifestyle?
I encourage people to start with food. In Earthlings, the food segment is 30 minutes of a 90-minute movie, so you can do the math. The one thing we can all do for the animals, the planet, and each other is go vegetarian. It’s the best for all parties involved: all other earthlings.
6. What are your thoughts on the relationship between nutrition, a vegan diet and health and wellness?
A vegan diet is undeniably healthier. Some people believe they’re eating meat and dairy for health reasons. Now I don’t mean to be rude, but I want to be real: if people want to eat animals it’s their own business, but the only thing animal products do for health is deteriorate it. Ironically, we have a war on drugs, a war on terror, a war on poverty…maybe we should have a war on food? Food kills more people than tobacco, alcohol, guns, crimes, AIDS, not wearing your seatbelt, etc.
7. You have a daughter. What advice can you offer on raising vegan kids?
That’s a challenging one. Parents choose what kids eat, but the problem is school. I make her lunch every day, and she eats whatever I give her. But if there’s cupcakes for someone’s birthday, or it’s pizza day, then it’s tricky. She likes to do what other kids do, so I’m mindful of that. I’ll bring in vegan pizza that looks the same. On Thanksgiving when they have turkey in the classroom, which is mortifying for me, I drag myself out of bed early and make a Tofurkey, then slice it up so it looks similar.
8. What’s the thinking behind your new film?
Unity is about being aware of the subtleties, those expressions of life we tend to be apathetic about, meaning we don’t consider them important. For many, this includes people starving to death in faraway countries, the poor, animals, other races, other religions, other political preferences. All these expressions share a zeal for life. Every form wants to survive – human, animal, tree. We need to get past our attachments to symbols like race and religion and tradition and nationality, if our attachments are dividing us, which they are.
Unity comes from an understanding of the world that doesn’t rely on opposites – us and them, human and nonhuman, rich and poor, etc. I mentioned dualism earlier. This applies particularly to the human ego. It wants to separate and distinguish itself from others.
9. Earthlings has inspired so many people to change their lives. How will people change after Unity?
They will recognize any other expression of life as the same as themselves, if for no other reason than it is here in the same atmosphere as we are.
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