Ethics of Animal Testing and the Fur Trade

 

Animals cruelty also know as animals abuse or animals neglect is the deliberate infliction by humans of abuse or suffering to any non-human animals, regardless if the act is illegal. Animals cruelty can be the causing of abuse or suffering for a gain, such as killing animal for food or clothing. Cruelty to animals is also deliberating harm to animal  for animal testing or being use for fur coats. Most people think animal cruelty is mainly people being unkind to animals.In fact there is many types of animals cruelty such as animals testing, factory farm and fur farms. Some organization such as PETA exist to tried to help prevent animals cruelty, the lack of knowing what animal cruelty is has allowed many forms of animals cruelty to continue to happen.

Animal Testing

The history of animals being use for medical experiment and testing of product have been going on for many centuries. Many people in the last centuries have join forces to stop animal testing. In the early twenty centuries an Arabic physician Avenzoar introduced testing animals as a method of testing medical procedure before performing on patients.(Abdel-Halim RE, 2005). W.M.S Russell and R.L Burchin in 1959 introduce the three Rs, which are the principles for ethical use of animal in testing. According to the article that  Badyal D and Desai C wrote the three Rs are: Replacement which is to use non-animal methods whenever it is possible, Reduction which is having researcher to obtain comparable information from fewer animals and Refinement which is to minimize potential pain, suffering or distress for the animals that are being used.(2014) (Russell, W.M.S. & Burch, R.L., 1959).

When trying to obtain global figures of animal testing it is very difficult to do. In 2014 the US Department of Agriculture said the total number of animal that was used in the US was 834,453 which was much lower than it was in 2005, the number of animal that was used in the US didn’t include rats and mice which make up about 90% of animal that are research on. According to Trull F.L, the number of rats and mice used in the US is estimated to be around 20 to 100 million a year.(1999). Some of the animals that are used in experiment are used for different reason such as cat being used for neurological  research or dogs being used in biomedical research, testing and or education. Dogs are mostly used to determine if a new medicine is safe before it is out to the public.

In the United States there is an estimate that about twenty billion animals are used every  year for educational purposes including classroom observation exercises, dissections and/or animal surgeries.(Patronek G Rauch, 2007 January, 1). The most common use animals that are used in classroom dissections are mostly frogs, fetal pigs, perch, cats and many more. In many US states and school districts mandate that a student be offered a choice on rather they want to dissect animals in their classroom. Many of this animals that are being used to test different medical experiment are usually killed after the experiment is over or when they aren’t useful anymore.

Factory Farming

Intensive animal farming also know as factory farming is the practice of keeping livestock such as cows, chickens, and fish at a higher stock densities than it would usually be at a family farm. The main purpose for factory farming is to produce large quantities of eggs, milks, and meats for human consumption.(Nierenberg Danielle, 2005).  Some animal activist groups such as PETA are wondering whether factory farming is sustainable and ethical. According to Danielle Nierenberg (2005), “factory farms were designed to bring animals to market as quickly and cheaply as possible but yet they invite a host of environmental, animal welfare, and public health problems.” When animals are in a crowded and unsanitary conditions its create a perfect environment for disease to spread quickly.

Animal and fish that comes from factory farm contain a large amount of unnatural ingredients that include persistent organic pollutants, polychlorinated biphenyls and many more. Today the meat industries is control by a handful of multinational corporation,leaving many farmers to have lost the connection to their animal and have lost control over their farms. Today people are removed from where their foods are from and what is being put in them. When vitamins were discovered it lead to vitamin supplement which allowed animal to be raised inside and the discovery of antibiotics and vaccines enable raising stock in large quantities by reducing the disease that they could catch. (Gordon John Steele, 1996). When vitamin D was discovered in the twenty century, it made it possible to keep chicken quarantine year round because before vitamin D most chicken didn’t thrive and egg production were difficult which made poultry expensive and could only get them when they are in season. According to Havenstein, “meat-type chickens currently grow to market weight in six to seven weeks, whereas only fifty years ago it took three times as long.”(P.R. Ferket & M.A. Qureshi, 2003a).  This is mostly due to nutritional modifications and antibiotics to make grow to be mature faster and quicker so that they can be sent to the slaughterhouses without them losing any profit.

Fur Trade

Most of fur industry’s skin come from animals that are kept in captive in fur factory farms. The farms can hold more than a thousands of animals and they we the farm the animals are the same around the globe. Like other animals farm, the methods that is used in the factory are designed to make money the quickest way in the expense of the animals. The animal that they used most in the fur farming are minks, foxes, chinchillas, lynxes and sometime hamsters.(Foulkes Nick, 2000 Oct 27). This animals that are forced to live in crowded small cage, live their life with fear, stress, disease, and other physical and psychological hardships all for the sake of the industry to make billions of dollars every year. Every year rabbits are slaughtered by the millions for their meat in fur in different part of the world. The fur of a rabbit once considered byproduct of the meat of the rabbit is now a industry to demands thousands of rabbit fur yearly.( Louisiana Veterinary Medical Association, 2007).  An investigation that was done by PETA of rabbit fur farms and slaughterhouse in China found that rabbits are forced to live in small, cramped, and filthy cages before they are being skinned.

Fur farmers pack animals into small cage to cut the costs of having them ram around in their natural habitats, which prevent them from taking no more the a few steps back and forth. This is especially distressing to minks who in their natural habitats occupy more than 2,500 acres of wetland in the wild.( Fur Commission USA, 2016 Jan 6). According to a  Zoologist at Oxford University who studies captive mink, “found that despite generations of being bred for fur, minks have not been domesticated and suffer greatly in captivity, especially if they don’t have the opportunity to swim. Mason, G.J. et al (2001). Frustrations of fur-farmed minks. South Park, UK: Springer Nature. The globalization of the fur trade make it hard to know where the finish fur product come from. The fur are moved around international auction houses and are distributed to manufacturers around the world, and the final piece is usually exported to different places around the world.

Animals cruelty can happen forms such passive and active. In passive abuse which is when animal are usually neglected and ignorance of the animals well being, while in an active abuse is when animals are being physical, killed and even tested on. Animal cruelty is not only people being unkind to animals but people treating animals as if they cannot feel the same types of pain like we humans can, when they are being tested on or when they are being skinned alive. Many organization are trying to get laws that would protect animals from this types of cruelty that the are faced with everyday of their lives until they are killed in the most inhumane way.