Why vegan?

Leather :: Wool :: Fur :: Animal Testing :: Down :: Silk

Crueler than fiction: real-life horror.

You are in a cage. You are removed from the cage once each day, but this is the moment you fear the most. Chemicals proposed for use in various new cosmetic lines are sprayed into your eyes, nasal passage, mouth, and throat. The confusion and panic always returns at these moments. You have seen others endure such excruciating pain that their bodily convulsions break their own necks. You are a rabbit in a cosmetics research lab.

You are in a cage. Everyday you are force-fed a proprietary antifreeze with known toxic agents. When you struggle, you are laughed at and slapped into submission. Your intestines are falling out from repeated ingestion of harsh chemicals. You are a beagle in a corporate-services animal research lab.

You are in a cage. Your arms and legs are secured. Your scalp and upper skull have been removed. Your brain is exposed. Two-inch screws are drilled into the remainder of your skull. You are a monkey in a university neuroscience lab.

You are in a cage. You are forced to share it with many others. You have been so pumped full of sugar substitutes that you have developed stomach cancer, and your genetic code has been altered on the wild hypothesis that an arbitrary piece of that code affects cancer's interaction with your body. To map your genetic code in the first place, several of your toes have been chopped off and processed. You are a mouse in a graduate student biology lab.

summary

Buying animal-tested products needlessly supports and encourages waking nightmares for tens of millions of innocent animals every year. To combat animal testing (also known as "vivisection"), refuse to buy animal-tested products (see this handy list of companies that don't animal-test). Or, take it one step further and refuse to buy from companies who test on animals for any of their products.

videos

WARNING: GRAPHIC TRUTH

Footage of actual vivisection labs (via Earthlings):

You are in a cage. You were born 1 week ago. A crude mechanized dummy, meant
to resemble a mother figure, sits next to you. The dummy forcefully hits you from time to time. This situation is meant to help determine whether or not emotional separation from one's mother is psychologically traumatic. You are a chimpanzee in a "maternal deprivation" study.

You are in a cage. The cage is filled with your own feces. You are on your thirteenth consecutive high-voltage electrocution in five minutes. The only way to escape electrocution is to jump over a high barrier in the middle of the cage, to the side of the floor that is not presently charged. The barrier is beyond the height of even your highest normal jumps, but your pain and fear were enough to push you over at first. Sometimes you've missed. Now you are tired. Soon you are so physically drained and emotionally hopeless that you no longer jump to avoid electrocution. You lie in it. The electrocution stops for today. You are a dog, a forced subject of a "classic" psychology experiment meant to find your breaking point.

Let's play "scientist."

That is, let's make a very plain observation of our own: Each of these common research forms is arbitrary and pointless. 

The only even conceivable way to justify such horrible acts would be if their were some verifiable, greater good at stake. But we already know what happens when humans and other animals are exposed to harsh chemicals. We already know that pumping a mouse full of its own body weight in sugar substitutes has no bearing on humans' biological reactions to those substances. We already know, from incidental human cases alone, that localized brain trauma affects relevant brain activity. We already know that withholding from nurturing and exposure to cruelty, particularly when young, are extremely traumatic conditions. We already know that we and other animals have a breaking point at which we will simply give up on living.

And there are a hundred other examples of such experiments. Pointlessness is a feature of nearly all animal testing -- which also goes by the term vivisection (quite gruesomely but accurately meaning "dissection of the living"). Defenders of animal testing say we need it to ensure safe products for humans and to find cures for human diseases. But that's just plain wrong. Scientists -- at least, those without a financial, ideological, or political stake in vivisection -- acknowledge that non-human animal research provides no scientific basis for drawing usable conclusions about humans. That's why a shift towards non-animal testing methods is gaining steam.

The bottom line.

Men of conscience understand that animal testing is wrong. They would never knowingly support torture and mutilation, for profit or any other reason. And The Ethical Man certainly won't.

Join us, won't you?

Thanks for reading,
Dan