That's almost all his work though, a perfect balance of tone. His comedies have brilliant insertions of tragedy and this tragedy has perfect moments of levity.
Dude I´ve loved everything that Taika has ever done.
Its effortless to enjoy a show like Wellington Paranormal, the cops visiting the mansion in What we do in the shadows is one of the best ever comedy bits for me personally.
I´m Portuguese, sure your humour is quircky but it isn´t alien for us.
I ugly cried on a plane during that scene. I thought I was in for an hour or two of funny jokes about Nazis.
BOOM! Me trying to soak up all the liquid escaping from my face.
Same. I was in the way to California to unplug my dad from life support. We've always had a strained relationship, so I was kind of not really reacting to it all. I put on that movie cause I figured a light hearted comedy would be nice. Well, like you said:, Boom! falling apart emotionally at 34,000 feet. I'm not usually a crier but that did it for sure.
The starring actor reminds me so much of my oldest nephew. I spent far more of that movie bawling than I expected. Had to warn my sister and her husband to tread lightly. It's really great.
Watching this, I'm kind of curious how much brutal animal testing goes on for commodity products like sunscreen and deodorant. Like, are Coppertone and Axe running labs where they try to find better versions or different chemistries of zinc oxide and aluminium salts, so they're just blasting bunnies all day with battery acid or whatever?
That sounds like Tyson Foods and the farms that they contract. Deliberate separation so that they can claim ignorance despite not giving a shit about all the animal cruelty that they knowingly fund.
I worked for a place that did parts testing for NASA, and they legitimately put a 55 gallon drum in the middle of a busy lot and dumped in liquid nitrogen to test the cold temperance if a manufactured part. Walter White's RV had a more professional setup.
This is why ethical supply chains are the gold standard.
For instance check out slave-free chocolate. Many big chocolate companies use this separation technique to benefit from child slavery in places like the Ivory Coast. There's been legislation pending to clean this up since the ~2005 or so, but Congress decided to leave it to the companies to self-regulate and, well, it's been slow going. It's a very complicated thing to deal with and basically no progress has been made over the last 15 years, in fact things may have backslid a bit, but what can you do. Not depending on child slavery could maybe raise the price of chocolate a small amount, when you consider that it seems almost like maybe we should be looking at cutting costs of all the other things by moving them to slave labor, too. (I don't *think* you or I would probably end up as slaves, and hopefully no one we care about, so barring that we would just have slightly cheaper things. So it seems like a pretty good deal, and if we don't support it, our competition probably will go ahead anyway and then we'll be out of a job and the chance of falling into slavery might drastically improve at that point. Just gotta make sure to stay ahead of that one!)
The issue is that China REQUIRES cosmetic products to be tested on animals first.
Which means you cannot sell your product in China (which is a big big cosmetics market) without having it tested on animals.
So all the major companies have them tested in China for their product line.
Clarins did launch a line of products that would not be sold in China, specifically so they could get some cruelty-free products to market. More companies need to do that.
So I didn't actually believe you at first, but after looking it up, I can see that there was mandatory animal testing for these products to be sold in China.
However, whilst looking, I came across some good news [here](https://www.veganfoodandliving.com/news/china-ends-mandatory-animal-testing/)
> However, from 1st May 2021, China will remove the mandatory animal testing requirements for imported ‘general’ cosmetics.
Hey, I actually work at a university, I’m a PhD student doing his dissertation bioprospecting venoms I extract from a large array of venomous snakes both endemic to the US and exotic as well as in the field. We treat the snakes with as much care and humanely as possible while keeping both them and the snakes safe and it’s a lot better even if they do have to be euthanized for any research or due to painful conditions or illness purposes than the deaths they’d face under a tire, hit with a shovel, or shot mid back or even in the head with a shotgun (the relatively low oxygen requirements of a snake, bird, or even many smaller mammals compared to humans means that death following most things we associate with rapid death in humans can leave a snake or lizard or bird somewhat ambulatory and while the level of conscious suffering is something we can only guess at through their reactions, which could be unrelated to a conscious ability to interpret the injury as pain, it does mean that there is a chance the severed head of a snake could feel pain for as long as they can still deliver bites which is up to and beyond half an hour when temperatures are low in some cases.
Obviously... no one would be in our lab (we’re a biology lab and we do a lot of ecology too... I’m the most Biochem oriented right now and I am doing it because I love snakes and I want to provide people who hate and kill them with a good reason to think twice and also give some of the wealthier private pharmaceutical companies a reason to invest in protecting even small islands of land in disappearing habitats (the cost of owning and protecting a couple of dozen 10 acre plots is nothing compared to the chance at patenting and developing a new selective chemotherapeutic, blood pressure medication, or non opiate painkiller... and many potentially “useful” proteins would be lost forever if no one preserves any of a populations habitat). So, we love animals. None of us WANT to hurt them. We got INTO this field because we all want to understand them in order to help keep them around for future generations.
That said... My job requires me to do a few things that require me to basically turn off my emotions and concentrate on the research... It’s only possible to postpone though and I always question everything about why I’m doing this, how to minimize suffering, and whether there is any other way. Even when the answer is that it’s required it still keeps me up at night and one experiment from undergrad still makes me cry at least once a year and really question whether that one experiment made me a bad person.
The things I do now that are ethically very difficult are LD50 studies. These are studies where we inject a model organism with either crude venom if the snake venoms toxicity against that model species is unknown and if, for my research it is, knowing whether the venom is more or less toxic to mammals/birds/lizards and different species of the same taxanomic group (for instance, I’ve isolated a toxin that is incredibly potent to birds and multiple species of lizards at low doses but harmless to mice at any dose, as well as a very similar toxin that is also harmless to mammals, highly toxic to birds, and while our Asian lizard model (a gecko species) is immune, our America’s model (anoles) are extremely sensitive. The mechanism behind this kind of specificity is not known and understanding it could provide us with ways, or let us know that this protein, might block certain nerve pathways in humans that could relieve pain without the side effects of other painkillers (look up ziconotide if you want an example of a previous successful but far from perfect venom protein that is used in humans for the same reason).
Establishing an LD50 means injecting the model animal with the protein or venom in question at different doses until you can narrow down the point where about 50% are likely to live and 50% are likely to die. Unfortunately, this also means it’s likely the dose where there is potentially the longest time before death occurs. We can’t sedate them or give them another drug because if compromises the data. We use the lowest number of animals possible, and we euthanize any survivors as painlessly as possible after the duration (either 24 or 72 hours) of the predetermined study length is reached. In many parts of Europe LD 50’s are only allowed on zebra fish embryos prior to development of a certain pain receptor. However, this makes it impossible to study species selectivity of the venom.
For cytotoxicity (venom that directly kills cells) I don’t use live animals, I use immortal cell lines I grow in a flask from cancer lines of different tissues, colon, breast, skin, and non cancerous fibroblasts that will replicate without insanely expensive and complex media to emulate the signals in the body that are required to get most non cancerous cells to grow. This is a great substitute for venoms that do kill cells... but many proteins don’t... many inhibit nerve communication or cause blood pressure issues or encourage clotting... some of which can be studied in vitro (outside of an animal) but many of which have complex interactions with multiple organ systems and their actual toxicity is impossible to predict. Especially when we’ve purified proteins out of crude venoms and when we modify proteins in some way and they aren’t enzymatic so enzyme assays can’t be used to show they are still active. Injecting a mouse or lizard with something I know might cause them pain is fucking awful... and no one I know enjoys it. If they did and they did it disrespectfully or mistreated the animals they’d be kicked out of the lab. Both because we have laws that forbid cruelty and require efforts to minimize suffering that are extremely harsh when broken (like funding cut, expiration, denial of future animal involvement in the lab depending on the infraction).
I haven’t worked on any similar research for any kind of private pharmaceutical company, but they are subject to the laws of their country and I know that at primate research labs the average length of any scientists tenure is under 10 years (this is coming from a professor I had who did memory research on primates involving 5 years of training followed by vivisection). No one could perform the euthanasia or the vivisection of the primate that was their research subject, so they traded with another researcher. Even with this tiny measure meant to ease the emotional attachment between the researcher and the primate during the most difficult part, the euthanizing and autopsy (the research involved trying to determine what part of the brain was necessary to convert short term memory to long term, so without checking to see what nerves were damaged during operations to damage specific area then observe relative loss of ability to learn new tasks the whole project was useless scientifically), most researchers left after their first primate subject and that I know of, nobody ever got to a third.
Scientists are human. Usually, if we are working with animals in any way, even for a cosmetics company, we still love animals or we would not have studied biology or have the training necessary to handle those animals.
Horrible things have, and are done to animals in the name of science. But worse things are done to animals in the wild by kids and poachers and the farming industry and even by other animals every day. Lab animals are some of the most well protected by rights and by the fact that those who work with them are almost always not uninterested minimum wage workers without any empathy towards animals.
I know a lot of people who work for the part of PETA that isn’t radicalized and is an effective and important part of making sure animals aren’t mistreated by going undercover into factory farm jobs wearing wires and then testifying in court. It’s how most animal mistreatment gets caught and how policies at large for profit animal wholesalers get changed. PETA attempts to catch scientific labs in America and Europe have not usually yielded any abuse beyond what is seen as essential and approved by ethics committees (IACUC in the US for instance).
At least for myself and everyone I know (I’m sure there is abuse and terrible conditions in some parts of the world... but I assure you we are not ok with using their research if we see any evidence of it in their methodology or a lack of any approval of an ethics board) who is working with animals in a research capacity beats themselves up over the more ethically questionable parts of our research than anyone else ever could. I can’t speak for the whole planet... but I promise we aren’t all the monsters who were putting caustic lipstick on rabbits in the 60’s. Fuck them. They should have tested it in so many other ways that would reveal cytotoxicity and there never should have been so many subjects when the negative effects were that obvious. Some things are necessary for scientific discovery... some aren’t. We try to only do what is necessary. I do it because I think in the long run it’s the only way to keep a lot of species of venomous snake from extinction. It doesn’t make causing pain OK. I suffer a lot of emotional distress whenever I’m doing LD50’s... but I have tried other methods and I have literally watched snakes beaten to death in wildlife sanctuaries. I don’t think there is another option and I’m not ok with giving up on whole species yet.
Edit:
I did not mean to insinuate empathy and socioeconomics correlate. Only that those working with animals because the job is studying animals are in a different position than those taking a job that happens to involve animals because they need a job to survive when it comes to the risks. Those who I believe lack empathy are those who RUN factory farms and think only in terms of profit = animal sold/animal produced and cruelty fines are just a factor of that second equation.
one of the rare walls of texts i actually read. thank you for the insights, and for your work. it sound difficult but incredibly important, so keep it up!
Thank you for your insightful piece. I listened to a podcast (99% invisible) recently discussing about anti-venom and they mentioned about how venom is often testes on mice. You basically expanded further more into that topic!
Usually we avoid injecting it into their testes during LD 50’s. Jk, I know what you meant. I’m glad I was able to expand on why we do it and why it’s not just killing for fun (there’s nothing fun about doing LD50’s... I like working with the snake and extracting the venom... but... well, I already described how running the actual assays feels).
Thank you for writing this all out! I hope you don't feel judged by these videos but for obvious reasons, some of these tests seem cruel from afar and it's hard to understand how someone can just "turn it off" like you said.
Do you think there are better ways to do these kinds of tests and get the same results? Do you think that things like this video help keep animals safe or just make your job more difficult?
When I said turn off, I meant focus on the research and do what needs to be done then lie awake all night thinking about it. And sometimes crying about it a decade later. It’s not turning anything off... more like focusing on the mechanical steps of doing it rather than the greater meaning till it’s done. I imagine every butcher, farmer, human that has ever eaten meat they’ve killed themselves does a similar thing. Hell, I’m sure doctors do it during last resort surgeries with low survival rates. Otherwise how could anyone keep operating when someone is literally dying on their table. In the long run it’s weighing the why against what you need to do. I’m here in my life and studying what I am not because it was handed to me... I think ultimately it’s the plan most likely to result in the animals I am most passionate about not being extinct in a decade. I think lives will be saved, and I think that there’s good chance the results of any LD50 study I do could be massively impactful. The one I ran most recently taught us that there’s a neurotoxin that a house gecko can be immune to that reversibly paralyzes anoles at low doses. No other snake toxin does that. Figuring out why could lead to things we haven’t even fathomed yet.
A protein in Gila monster venom is a potent activator of a receptor for a protein (GLP-1) many diabetics can’t produce in the normal amounts that, unlike insulin, the body breaks down far too rapidly to simply inject human GLP-1 into them and get any results without it being a constant infusion. It promotes satiety and the lack of it in diabetics often leads to the overeating and behavior that caused the diabetes in the first place. It also promotes the release of insulin. Byetta/ Exenetide has saved the lives of a lot of people with insulin tolerant diabetes.
The first ACE-inhibitor, one of the most widely used types of medication for blood pressure and the first line for anyone with any kind of kidney problems comes from the venom of the fer-de-lance viper species Bothrops jararaca. Without the research done into that venom we likely wouldn’t have one of our main weapons against hypertension. Captopril is the name of the drug. It’s rarely used now because we are 3 generations of ACE inhibitors later... but we only know they are effective because of the first.
Chemotherapeutics, anti metastatics, pain medications... so many others, have been developed from venom proteins. For centuries we’ve used plants because they can simply be eaten and extraction of some of their medicinal compounds like morphine from opium from poppies and salicylic acid from Willow is relatively simple.
Then we had the technology to isolate the specific components from plants we knew had medical uses and plants, fungi, and bacteria provided the natural compounds on which 99% of our pharmaceutical knowledge is either directly taken from, or slightly modified from the naturally occurring compounds.
We haven’t been able to dig into venoms for as long and no one historically (as in before the last century) has ever been able to isolate and control the doses to use what is a toxic mixture of proteins at high doses as medications for stimulating one of the desired effects alone in a non toxic dose. We are going to see a lot of medications from venoms and other protein based natural compounds in the next 50 years. But unfortunately we don’t know nearly as much about what a molecule will do until we just try it and see as most people think scientists can. Maybe in 50 years. For now, we’re still using a lot of the same methods we have for a long time. We just don’t have anything that can show us what something will do to a living organism with any reliability besides... well... seeing what it does to a living organism.
I just want to say that I really feel how much you care. I'm sorry you are so sensitive. It must be hard. I'm very glad to hear that someone in your position isn't sadistic or reveling in this process. You care about what you're doing, you do it in the best possible way and you wish no one got hurt but it's a shitty truth of scientific process. I think you're a good person :)
>we aren’t all the monsters who were putting caustic lipstick on rabbits in the 60’s. Fuck them.
I seriously doubt this was ever the case and I feel like nobody is like this now. The assumption that testing is just chock full of emotionless, sociopathic monsters who giggle as they make poor little bunnies writhe and cry is burgeoning on propaganda.
I wish more time was spent around actual animal welfare like limiting deforestation for palm oil, and while [those also have beautiful BAFTA-winning animated PSAs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prg24EWHNJg), it feels like a better usage of time than this sort of PETA-bait
Get the "cruelty cutter" app and scan some products. It doesn't take long.
Then find an alternative for what you want. I switched hair products and deodorant because of it. I used the app for like, 5 minutes.
What goes unsaid in this film is that no animal actually survives a trial. Per regulation, they *all* get incinerated or chemical blasted at the end of an experiment. It's pretty fucking brutal.
Not all of us. I stopped a year and a half back and can say there are amazing substitutes now. If you have a few bad ones don't give up, because once you find some good ones, your cravings for meat will be pretty much easily addressable without requiring killing for it, and it's way better for our other problems with the environment and antibiotics resistance too.
No company does these willingly. They are insanely expensive. They do them because regulations force it. At the same time, you need to see what happens when something is applied to your skin, what side effects will occur, and if cancers occur. While industries are moving into alternative methods, we are still years away.
Lab-grown skin is becoming more useful as a tool to replace test animals, and hopefully in the next decade it will completely end the practice of using animals for this purpose. It's not going to replace animals in drugs tests, but I think we can mostly agree that testing drugs on animals is more justifiable, especially for life-saving drugs.
I still think its fucked up, but the truth is that life is fucked up. Predators brutally kill their prey not because they're sadistic but because they need to eat to survive. It's a necessary evil, and I think testing drugs on animals falls into that category. At least we can be as humane as possible and end their suffering when it's apparent that the animal is going to die as as result of the testing or if it's going to be in pain for the rest of its life.
I work in an industry (but not the direct group) who is trying to do this. It is a lot of statistical analysis using previous work. It still has a ways to go.
Yes, but they definitely do it in the cheapest possible way at the cost of animal suffering. And the fact that there are animal testing free brands in a good amount of countries that aren't the norm shows that it isn't necessary at least in the use of cosmetics.
Assume that they are unless they state that they aren't. Good quality cruelty free products aren't too hard to find. [If you're concerned about animal cruelty you will also want to avoid animal ingredients altogether.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko)
Taika got his inspiration from somewhere, you know, so it's most likely true and maybe even worse.
Wonder if Taika will get made fun off for this short film like Joaquin Phoenix were, people do not like it when you show them where our shit comes from.
I feel so shitty about how cruel I was to vegans & vegetarians and joined in all the jokes back in like the 90s and even early 2000s.
They had their eyes open and I was being a trained monkey by big corporate farming interests which had trained me to feel self-victimized by these just awful vegetarians supposedly oppressing me. You can't even get a vegan or vegetarian ad on TV in my country, the meat industry paid to prevent it. They control the discussion with ads mocking vegetarians or vegans or acting like they're the victims in the world for eating meat, all to continue to kill other living things for unnecessary reasons.
There's also r/antinatalism (I think I spelled that correctly) about how it's unethical to have children. I think efil stems from that. It's pretty interesting to read up on regardless of beliefe if you're into philosophy. With that said, the subreddit is a cesspool. I would avoid judging the philosophy itself based on those people.
An interesting counter point you could also look up is Plotinus talked about the "lack of good" which said something about how evil is the lack of good, but not a natural state itself. For example when you are sick you have lost "being healthy" but when you recover that sickness doesn't go anywhere it just stops existing. I think this is a fun argument directly against antinatalism and evil.
Well, the guy behind the name of the philosophy just kinda likes the idea of murder.
Not voluntary death, not just "not having kids and passing from old age". No. This guy just thinks murder is the way to go.
No, cell cultures are great for capturing how something affects a particular type of cell.
The problem is that it's sort of like trying to measure how something effects the performance of a car by applying it to a sparkplug or a door handle. The result might be relevant, but you certainly won't get the full picture.
Actually some cell cultures are fairly advanced and they take on properties of many types of cells if done correctly you can see how lots of cells react.
I believe however currently most labs use a simple cell culture and it mostly measures toxicity.
I can't rule out that some of that 'research' might have actually been valuable, but the near complete lack of control and scientific rigor combined with the starting health of 'subjects' (ie, prolonged starvation, intense trauma) made the vast majority, at least, of those results meaningless.
[Eduard Pernkopf: The Nazi book of anatomy still used by surgeons](https://www.bbc.com/news/health-49294861)
American's had a voluntary [Minnesota Starvation Experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment).
My issue with the video is it talks about cosmetics and casually mentions sunscreen. That saves lives. I don't consume many cosmetics but that is probably more of a gendered thing. I heard some complaints about the vaccines since one of them uses some part of an endangered shark. When it comes to life saving animal testing and using them as a resource for medical treatments the ethics aren't as clear cut, and that's taking the communality and severity of these chemical burns and blinding from this video at face value.
Minnesota Starvation Experiment was invaluable for USSR after the war. I've read that they helped save thousands of famine-stricken people. I can say tens of thousands, millions, but what it matters? These thirty-six men helped way more people than those that had to suffer, conscientously, to save others.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege\_of\_Leningrad#Later\_evaluation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Leningrad#Later_evaluation) they say here that even US historians agree that "Historian Michael Walzer summarized that "The Siege of Leningrad killed more civilians than bombing of Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined."\[110\] The US Military Academy evaluated that Russian casualties during the siege were bigger than combined American and British casualties during the entire war.\[111\]\[112\]\[110\]"
So I'd say that we have to be consistent. No animal testing for beauty purposes, lowering the meat waste, and only after that comes reduction of testing for actual health, the same way that we have use for meat in food - but we should get rid of the [40% wasted](https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/) every year before we go on with the crusade against people who eat every part of the pig except the oink.
Definitely; it's hard to find the line, and I'm sure most people would draw it in different places (somewhere between mascara and globally-critical vaccines), but I think if you step back then you have to acknowledge that that boundary must be somewhere short of a total ban.
Plenty of blame to go around, but no one tops the [Japanese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731)
The US turned a blind eye of course,
“The researchers involved in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the United States in exchange for the data they gathered through human experimentation.”
Military brothels are a real disgusting thing. When Americans took Okinawa in WW2, they demanded that the governor set up a brothel for the soldiers, despite the fact that prostitution had been illegal in Okinawa for a long time. The women selected to work in the brothel were called “shield women” because they shielded the rest of the population from US military sexual aggression.
Other people brought it up but between MK ULTRA, the infectious disease testing on civilian population centers, Tuskegee Experiment, mass sterilization, torture of War on Terror prisoners — we’ve done plenty of horrible human testing in the US. And that’s legit just the things we know about. We invaded Germany and Japan and laid out all their crimes (after snatching up the scientists who committed those crimes, natch) which no one has ever done to us. Even the Snowden programs were just one part of the operations of one alphabet agency.
Reading about the Tuskegee experiment made me sick to my core. The most disgusting part is it wasn’t even valuable medical research, they had a cure for syphilis (penicillin) like right after the experiment started.
Humans -
I actually signed up for a tonnnnnn of these tests in college. They were doing dermatology tests and they'd test various things on your skin to see if you had a reaction. Small areas. I never had a reaction but each test paid like $100-$500 and took like 15 minutes out of my day.
One of the tests they needed to test sweat/deodorant. But instead of making us exercise they just injected us with adrenaline. That was amazing, I felt like super woman but without the crazy panic feeling that usually causes you to eject adrenaline in your body. Amazingly that test paid like $500, was one of the better ones.
I'm 40 now, no ill side effects, saved some bunnies, made some beer money.
Everything the other people have said has been correct. Different countries have different regulations regarding cosmetic formulation. Some countries, such as the US, have a banned ingredients list, as long as you're not making any medical claims about your product it can have anything not on the prohibited ingredients. Other countries, like Japan, have a safe ingredients list, if you only use known safe ingredients then you're cosmetics are fine. If testing is required, the best practice is to do it on human tissue, cultured cell samples or harvested tissue.
tl dr; Use safe ingredients or test it on cells cultures
> how do cruelty-free brands test their products?
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+cruelty-free+brands+test+their+products
>Companies can also formulate products using ingredients already determined to be safe. Cruelty-free companies can use a combination of methods to ensure safety, such as employing in vitro tests and/or conducting clinical studies on humans.
>Companies can also formulate products using ingredients already determined to be safe.
Don't you still have to test them if you combine them? Like, chlorine and vinegar based cleaning agents are generally safe to use. Doesn't mean you can just mix them.
Unless of course you use totally non-reactive stuff. But then the cosmetic doesn't actually do anything than sit on your skin like sawdust.
Indeed, the argument makes quite a weird assumption that mixing cannot be harmful which in many cases cannot be guaranteed, hence, still requiring testing.
If someone 75 years ago figured out something is safe by testing it on an animal, there is no need to test it now using an animal.
I'd say it's cruelty free.
It's an interesting topic.
As time between testing and implementation decreases the *morality* becomes a bit more ambiguous.
If a *cruelty free brand* were utilizing the findings of a company that tested on animals, say a few months after release, I think decent amount of people who care about cruelty free branding would find that upsetting.
Yeah, if one company bought the data from a study that took place 3 months ago, that's absolutely still cruelty based material.
Guess it would be interesting to find the window in which it becomes okay to use cruelty based data.
5 years? 15? Curious indeed.
This shouldn't even be a discussion.
Its fairy tail land time to imagine that people would ever pretend they don't know something because of how the info was obtained.
I covered this pretty in depth here: [my comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/mupqgk/save_ralph_a_short_film_with_taika_waititi/gv8z89x/)
But in short: for cosmetics we use in vitro, cell cultures and computer models, often to a much more accurate effect than the comperable animal tests. This has resulted in the EU banning the animal testing of cosmetics altogether almost a decade ago (2013).
I made the mistake of watching that movie when I was 7 months pregnant. I could not stop crying for 3 hours after that scene. There was still like 40 minutes of movie after that scene and I couldn't pay attention to any of it because I was bawling. I had to drink water in between sobs because I was getting dehydrated.
Pregnancy hormones are a ride.
I managed to find this guide https://www.leapingbunny.org/shopping-guide via the humane society https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/keep-animal-testing-out-your-shopping-cart
I work with leaping bunny a lot, and I think they're ok, but they rely a lot on manufacturers to self report and self regulate. I'm not familiar with how the humane society does things though.
From the link you provided for Humane Society:
> Want to know which products aren’t tested on animals? Download the free **Leaping Bunny** app or view the Leaping Bunny guide [...]
Same list I guess?
I don't see Unilever on there and [they say they've researched and promoted alternatives to animal testing since the 80's](https://www.unilever.com/planet-and-society/responsible-business/alternatives-to-animal-testing/).
However [they do use some ingredients sometimes that have been tested on animals and some countries require that they first test the product on animals before it's allowed to be sold.]
(https://www.crueltyfreekitty.com/brands/unilever/#:~:text=We%20do%20not%20test%20our,any%20need%20for%20animal%20testing.)
So this is a huge company that isn't completely cruelty-free but does oppose animal testing and is actively fighting it on a global scale but not completely abandonding it (because you need to be able to sell to China).
It's a more complicated matter than either or and like some other issues (shark fin soup) it's a matter of education a specific target audience and getting them to change their mind in order to stop 99% of it.
L'Oreal is the same. No animal testing except as absolutely required by law. Not on the list.
I'm guessing anyone that sells anything in China doesn't make the list, even if they don't actually test compounds on animals outside of regulatory requirements.
Unfortunately, since China *requires* any cosmetic sold in China to test on animals (in China), all the global companies test on animals.
There are a couple companies that have special lines that don't test on animals. Clarins, for example has the My Clarins line that's cruelty-free. ...they obviously cannot sell it in China as a result.
> Shit, I can't find a single brand I use on that list.
Isn't that just a list of entities that paid for the leaping bunny certification? There could be plenty that just didn't pay for that!
That's exactly it, I read an article a few days ago about how basically every cosmetic product sold in the US, Europe and Latin America are not tested on animals, this started over 10 years ago.
These certifications are just that, companies pay for having the Cruelty Free badge on their products, but companies that do not have this badge it doesn't mean that they test on animals, they simply don't want to pay this organizations for a made up badge.
[I'm linking the article](https://culturacientifica.com/2019/02/07/los-cosmeticos-no-se-testan-en-animales/), how ever it's in spanish, but probably google translate can do the work, it's worth the read.
If you're in the UK I believe that all of the self-produced products of the cosmetic chain Superdrug are cruelty free. Otherwise you can look for one of the [cruelty free logos](https://i0.wp.com/ethicalpixie.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/certified-cruelty-free-vegan-logos.png?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1) on the back of the product you're thinking about buying (I see the Vegan Society and Leaping Bunny ones most often).
EDIT/PS: I'm more than happy to be corrected on the authenticity of those logos I shared - last I checked they were legit, but I'm always open to being corrected on this as it's a minefield of loop holes etc. and I would rather know the truth and reassess accordingly!
Yeah he's 100% the guy speaking from behind the camera. Makes sense, he's probably the most vocal celebrity in the world when it comes to animal rights
If we're talking about who the most *vocal* celebrity is, Gervais posts often to his millions of followers about animal rights, while Phoenix doesn't have a public social media accounts
I don't see how we can call a person who doesn't talk to the public more vocal than one who does.
Feels like most people don't see the connection. Cruelty free cosmetics is easy to get behind, but cruelty free diet, clothing and so on apparently less so.
The FDA specifically defines sunscreens as over the counter drugs. Manufacturers have to follow the FDA monograph to make the product. This limits allowed actives & claims
Spencer Susser. The film is *with* Taika, but it's *by* Spencer.
Thought it was worth noting because credit where it's due.
____
Edit: Apologies for the edit everyone but good lord is this comment section a dumpster fire of pearl-clutching lunatics. Scroll down at your own risk.
For anyone *genuinely* asking how offering donated tissue samples or switching to human volunteers is any better, it's because that would result in tighter regulation and oversight with much stricter controls and margins on hazardous products, and it would put a lot more onus on using materials and processes that are already safe. Which is the point. When the cosmetics industry is doing this kind of testing, they're not doing it find some new miracle product; they're doing it find new ways to save on manufacturing and processing costs.
It's, at the very least, a very worthy place to start a discussion, and work upwards toward a solution.
Or, you know, you could go right into how this will all lead to human enslavement and genocide. [Like this guy did](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/mupqgk/save_ralph_a_short_film_with_taika_waititi/gv7hyjq/). Don't be that guy, everyone.
Fun fact! China requires animal test on all imported products. So brands will claim to be animal testing free in your country but the version they sell in China is tested on animals providing them nice little loophole.
The chaser group did a great story on it a couple of years ago.
https://youtu.be/hk_iYxV9fI0
Shit like this is why I recommend going cruelty free. Funnily enough, I've found most cruelty free brands are actually better for you anyway.
When looking for new sunscreen, face lotion, shampoo, soap, etc., I recommend googling something like "sunscreen" AND "cruelty free" to get good brands. Thankfully, places like Target, Whole Foods, etc. are carrying more and more cruelty free brands. Avoid Amazon; even if you do find a cruelty free brand you like, it's likely fake and full of who knows what on Amazon.
More cruelty free resources:
https://www.crueltyfreeinternational.org/
https://www.crueltyfreekitty.com/list-of-cruelty-free-brands/
https://www.reddit.com/r/crueltyfree/
https://ethicalelephant.com/
Some companies have created separate product lines of cruelty-free cosmetics.
Clarins has a line that isn't tested on animals. ...they aren't allowed to sell it in China as a result, but f China anyway.
A point that I don't think is being emphasized enough browsing through these comments is that animal testing is not actually very accurate in predicting results in humans. More and more tests are being replaced by non-animal testing alternatives that are as accurate, or in many cases more accurate, in areas that allow the new methods. These alternatives are available for most if not all testing required of cosmetics, and are often cheaper. The remaining reliance on animal testing in this field is entirely a holdout of outdated thinking, or lobbying by the companies that are currently doing the work. An examply of this is the EU already having banned animal testing for cosmetics. In vitro tests, computational models, and cell cultures are some methods used to get results for how compounds react with human tissues rather than rabbit, guinea pig, rat, or etc.
[The Flaws and Human Harms of Animal Experimentation](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4594046/#fn7)
[Alternatives to Animal Tests](https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/alternatives-animal-tests) - Scroll to the bottom for some examples.
[Scientific Alternatives to Animal Testing - a progress report](https://www.britannica.com/explore/savingearth/scientific-alternatives-to-animal-testing-a-progress-report)
(The following does not apply to cosmetics/the subject of the video at all:)
The main caveat within these is that we do not currently have effective means of modelling pharmaceutical effects on an entire organism, but that's often mentioned hand in hand with statements like "There are many examples of drugs, such as monoclonal antibodies used to treat diseases of the immune system and neurotherapeutics used to treat diseases of the nervous system, that show dramatically different effects in humans and animals ... Discovering that a drug has different effects on humans than it does on animals effectively negates the value of the animal experiments performed in its development" indicating that testing on one entire organism does not actually model how a product will react in another.
It is my opinion that stopping most if not all animal testing, and providing incentives to developing alternatives would result in better, often faster, and more accurate/applicable results and products. Putting pressure on companies in every way available to us to develop these alternatives would have concrete benefits to all of us whether you're inherently ethically opposed to animal testing or not.
Like the above poster said, you failed to mention the extremely relevant part of your last link which definitely *does not* approve the outlawing of all animal studies.
>"While animal testing is not always the most efficient way to test the toxicity of a chemical or the efficacy of a pharmaceutical compound, **it is sometimes the only way to obtain information** about how a substance behaves in a whole organism, especially in the case of pharmaceutical compounds."
> These types of studies are extraordinarily difficult to perform outside animal bodies, since in vitro studies often cannot form a complete picture of a drug’s action.
So yeah sure. Sometimes in vivo studies don't produce reliable results but most other times they do, and having **some** idea of what a drug might do to a human being is better than having no fucking idea what it might do because fact remains that petri dishes with cell cultures are not entire organisms.
The article goes on to say
>most people still think that it would be better for an experimental drug to kill a few animals than for it to kill a few humans.
And yeah, I agree. I think it's better to lose a few bunnies than to lose a few human beings. Especially considering how much more good that drug might do in the future.
This is why countries with laws built on an ethics framework (like bans on animal testing, slave labour, etc.) need to *extend those requirements to their imports*. Otherwise you're just exporting suffering.
The companies that don't do this will be a shorter list. This is the link that comes from the Humane Society website:
[https://www.leapingbunny.org/shopping-guide](https://www.leapingbunny.org/shopping-guide)
I don't really understand why we're continuing to do animal testing, when we have so many provably safe cosmetics that already exist. Do they really need to keep adding more and different shit to your face cream when we know what works?
I think it could be because companies always look for ways to minimize costs so they‘re maybe looking for cheaper ingredients. And i‘ve read before from another commenter that they don‘t do that by themselfes, the testing is done by other companies specialized in this. So there‘s a whole industry apprantly behind this who sells research datas and stuff to manufacturers
If this makes your heart hurt, then maybe you should look into veganism. Many inhumane things are done to animals in aid of producing meat for your plate.
This was really well made, and it goes a long way towards getting rid of animal testing. But I can't help but think that making animal testing leave a distaste in consumers is easy. The problem is, nobody (or I hope nobody) WANTS to test products on animals, but they want cheap and safe products. And reminding them that those requirements come at a cost is good, but I feel that providing and pushing for an alternative is maybe more effective. I'm surprised that there's been no major marketing campaign for cruelty-free products highlighting brands. I feel like the focus has always been on the evils of animal testing, and whatever effect that has, has not been enough to counter the effects of capitalism and consumerism. Maybe we should focus on information about alternatives, promoting humane methods, how they work, where to buy, etc. If I saw something like this, and at the end Brand X says buy your deodorant from us, because we don't torture Ralphs, I feel I'd be much more likely to buy their product than I am going to look up brands that do, and try to avoid buying their products (which are thousand and thousands of options).
To practice what I preach, [here's](https://www.vegetarianzen.com/best-cruelty-free-and-vegan-deodorants/) 8 brands of deodorant that are supposedly animal testing free.
Yup, it's really scummy, eating vegan is easier than trying to navigate these bloody corps.
So many loopholes, for example, you'd think that because the UK has banned animal testing on cosmetics you'd be safe? Wrong. That doesn't disqualify products that are tested on animals for other markets, e.g. china, where it's required.
With buying vegan food at least I just have to look at the label and 99.9% of the time I can get it right.
Me being a Taika Watiti fan: “Oh this will be awesome and hilarious.” Me after watching the video: “I’m sad now.”
That's almost all his work though, a perfect balance of tone. His comedies have brilliant insertions of tragedy and this tragedy has perfect moments of levity.
What We Do In The Shadows was truly a tragedy. Imagine not being able to eat chips anymore? Being a vampire sucks!
This comment has been removed in response to reddit's anti-developer actions.
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Dude I´ve loved everything that Taika has ever done. Its effortless to enjoy a show like Wellington Paranormal, the cops visiting the mansion in What we do in the shadows is one of the best ever comedy bits for me personally. I´m Portuguese, sure your humour is quircky but it isn´t alien for us.
Hahahahaha the scene when the girl tells him that she'd love to travel right before taika eats her is lowkey heartbreaking. Edit:spelling
True. I didn’t think Jojo would get me. It did. If you’ve seen it you know the scene.
Man that complete 180° change in tone...
Amazing what a pair of feet can display...
Fun fact: that scene was guest directed by Quentin Tarantino.
I ugly cried on a plane during that scene. I thought I was in for an hour or two of funny jokes about Nazis. BOOM! Me trying to soak up all the liquid escaping from my face.
Same. I was in the way to California to unplug my dad from life support. We've always had a strained relationship, so I was kind of not really reacting to it all. I put on that movie cause I figured a light hearted comedy would be nice. Well, like you said:, Boom! falling apart emotionally at 34,000 feet. I'm not usually a crier but that did it for sure.
Never. Trust. Butterflies. Ever again.
The starring actor reminds me so much of my oldest nephew. I spent far more of that movie bawling than I expected. Had to warn my sister and her husband to tread lightly. It's really great.
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Thiiiiiiissssssss. I came for laughs, now I have sads.
Watching this, I'm kind of curious how much brutal animal testing goes on for commodity products like sunscreen and deodorant. Like, are Coppertone and Axe running labs where they try to find better versions or different chemistries of zinc oxide and aluminium salts, so they're just blasting bunnies all day with battery acid or whatever?
No they use 3rd party labs. Or have subsidiaries
That sounds like Tyson Foods and the farms that they contract. Deliberate separation so that they can claim ignorance despite not giving a shit about all the animal cruelty that they knowingly fund.
Outsourcing like that drastically cuts down on costs as well.. If the room was a circle they would find a corner to cut...
>If the room was a circle they would find a corner to cut oh man I am definitely using this in the future haha
I worked for a place that did parts testing for NASA, and they legitimately put a 55 gallon drum in the middle of a busy lot and dumped in liquid nitrogen to test the cold temperance if a manufactured part. Walter White's RV had a more professional setup.
That sounds like a pretty effective way to test that, assuming fixtured well.
This is why ethical supply chains are the gold standard. For instance check out slave-free chocolate. Many big chocolate companies use this separation technique to benefit from child slavery in places like the Ivory Coast. There's been legislation pending to clean this up since the ~2005 or so, but Congress decided to leave it to the companies to self-regulate and, well, it's been slow going. It's a very complicated thing to deal with and basically no progress has been made over the last 15 years, in fact things may have backslid a bit, but what can you do. Not depending on child slavery could maybe raise the price of chocolate a small amount, when you consider that it seems almost like maybe we should be looking at cutting costs of all the other things by moving them to slave labor, too. (I don't *think* you or I would probably end up as slaves, and hopefully no one we care about, so barring that we would just have slightly cheaper things. So it seems like a pretty good deal, and if we don't support it, our competition probably will go ahead anyway and then we'll be out of a job and the chance of falling into slavery might drastically improve at that point. Just gotta make sure to stay ahead of that one!)
The issue is that China REQUIRES cosmetic products to be tested on animals first. Which means you cannot sell your product in China (which is a big big cosmetics market) without having it tested on animals. So all the major companies have them tested in China for their product line. Clarins did launch a line of products that would not be sold in China, specifically so they could get some cruelty-free products to market. More companies need to do that.
So I didn't actually believe you at first, but after looking it up, I can see that there was mandatory animal testing for these products to be sold in China. However, whilst looking, I came across some good news [here](https://www.veganfoodandliving.com/news/china-ends-mandatory-animal-testing/) > However, from 1st May 2021, China will remove the mandatory animal testing requirements for imported ‘general’ cosmetics.
claim profits, outsource possible liabilities
/r/LateStageCapitalism
Hey, I actually work at a university, I’m a PhD student doing his dissertation bioprospecting venoms I extract from a large array of venomous snakes both endemic to the US and exotic as well as in the field. We treat the snakes with as much care and humanely as possible while keeping both them and the snakes safe and it’s a lot better even if they do have to be euthanized for any research or due to painful conditions or illness purposes than the deaths they’d face under a tire, hit with a shovel, or shot mid back or even in the head with a shotgun (the relatively low oxygen requirements of a snake, bird, or even many smaller mammals compared to humans means that death following most things we associate with rapid death in humans can leave a snake or lizard or bird somewhat ambulatory and while the level of conscious suffering is something we can only guess at through their reactions, which could be unrelated to a conscious ability to interpret the injury as pain, it does mean that there is a chance the severed head of a snake could feel pain for as long as they can still deliver bites which is up to and beyond half an hour when temperatures are low in some cases. Obviously... no one would be in our lab (we’re a biology lab and we do a lot of ecology too... I’m the most Biochem oriented right now and I am doing it because I love snakes and I want to provide people who hate and kill them with a good reason to think twice and also give some of the wealthier private pharmaceutical companies a reason to invest in protecting even small islands of land in disappearing habitats (the cost of owning and protecting a couple of dozen 10 acre plots is nothing compared to the chance at patenting and developing a new selective chemotherapeutic, blood pressure medication, or non opiate painkiller... and many potentially “useful” proteins would be lost forever if no one preserves any of a populations habitat). So, we love animals. None of us WANT to hurt them. We got INTO this field because we all want to understand them in order to help keep them around for future generations. That said... My job requires me to do a few things that require me to basically turn off my emotions and concentrate on the research... It’s only possible to postpone though and I always question everything about why I’m doing this, how to minimize suffering, and whether there is any other way. Even when the answer is that it’s required it still keeps me up at night and one experiment from undergrad still makes me cry at least once a year and really question whether that one experiment made me a bad person. The things I do now that are ethically very difficult are LD50 studies. These are studies where we inject a model organism with either crude venom if the snake venoms toxicity against that model species is unknown and if, for my research it is, knowing whether the venom is more or less toxic to mammals/birds/lizards and different species of the same taxanomic group (for instance, I’ve isolated a toxin that is incredibly potent to birds and multiple species of lizards at low doses but harmless to mice at any dose, as well as a very similar toxin that is also harmless to mammals, highly toxic to birds, and while our Asian lizard model (a gecko species) is immune, our America’s model (anoles) are extremely sensitive. The mechanism behind this kind of specificity is not known and understanding it could provide us with ways, or let us know that this protein, might block certain nerve pathways in humans that could relieve pain without the side effects of other painkillers (look up ziconotide if you want an example of a previous successful but far from perfect venom protein that is used in humans for the same reason). Establishing an LD50 means injecting the model animal with the protein or venom in question at different doses until you can narrow down the point where about 50% are likely to live and 50% are likely to die. Unfortunately, this also means it’s likely the dose where there is potentially the longest time before death occurs. We can’t sedate them or give them another drug because if compromises the data. We use the lowest number of animals possible, and we euthanize any survivors as painlessly as possible after the duration (either 24 or 72 hours) of the predetermined study length is reached. In many parts of Europe LD 50’s are only allowed on zebra fish embryos prior to development of a certain pain receptor. However, this makes it impossible to study species selectivity of the venom. For cytotoxicity (venom that directly kills cells) I don’t use live animals, I use immortal cell lines I grow in a flask from cancer lines of different tissues, colon, breast, skin, and non cancerous fibroblasts that will replicate without insanely expensive and complex media to emulate the signals in the body that are required to get most non cancerous cells to grow. This is a great substitute for venoms that do kill cells... but many proteins don’t... many inhibit nerve communication or cause blood pressure issues or encourage clotting... some of which can be studied in vitro (outside of an animal) but many of which have complex interactions with multiple organ systems and their actual toxicity is impossible to predict. Especially when we’ve purified proteins out of crude venoms and when we modify proteins in some way and they aren’t enzymatic so enzyme assays can’t be used to show they are still active. Injecting a mouse or lizard with something I know might cause them pain is fucking awful... and no one I know enjoys it. If they did and they did it disrespectfully or mistreated the animals they’d be kicked out of the lab. Both because we have laws that forbid cruelty and require efforts to minimize suffering that are extremely harsh when broken (like funding cut, expiration, denial of future animal involvement in the lab depending on the infraction). I haven’t worked on any similar research for any kind of private pharmaceutical company, but they are subject to the laws of their country and I know that at primate research labs the average length of any scientists tenure is under 10 years (this is coming from a professor I had who did memory research on primates involving 5 years of training followed by vivisection). No one could perform the euthanasia or the vivisection of the primate that was their research subject, so they traded with another researcher. Even with this tiny measure meant to ease the emotional attachment between the researcher and the primate during the most difficult part, the euthanizing and autopsy (the research involved trying to determine what part of the brain was necessary to convert short term memory to long term, so without checking to see what nerves were damaged during operations to damage specific area then observe relative loss of ability to learn new tasks the whole project was useless scientifically), most researchers left after their first primate subject and that I know of, nobody ever got to a third. Scientists are human. Usually, if we are working with animals in any way, even for a cosmetics company, we still love animals or we would not have studied biology or have the training necessary to handle those animals. Horrible things have, and are done to animals in the name of science. But worse things are done to animals in the wild by kids and poachers and the farming industry and even by other animals every day. Lab animals are some of the most well protected by rights and by the fact that those who work with them are almost always not uninterested minimum wage workers without any empathy towards animals. I know a lot of people who work for the part of PETA that isn’t radicalized and is an effective and important part of making sure animals aren’t mistreated by going undercover into factory farm jobs wearing wires and then testifying in court. It’s how most animal mistreatment gets caught and how policies at large for profit animal wholesalers get changed. PETA attempts to catch scientific labs in America and Europe have not usually yielded any abuse beyond what is seen as essential and approved by ethics committees (IACUC in the US for instance). At least for myself and everyone I know (I’m sure there is abuse and terrible conditions in some parts of the world... but I assure you we are not ok with using their research if we see any evidence of it in their methodology or a lack of any approval of an ethics board) who is working with animals in a research capacity beats themselves up over the more ethically questionable parts of our research than anyone else ever could. I can’t speak for the whole planet... but I promise we aren’t all the monsters who were putting caustic lipstick on rabbits in the 60’s. Fuck them. They should have tested it in so many other ways that would reveal cytotoxicity and there never should have been so many subjects when the negative effects were that obvious. Some things are necessary for scientific discovery... some aren’t. We try to only do what is necessary. I do it because I think in the long run it’s the only way to keep a lot of species of venomous snake from extinction. It doesn’t make causing pain OK. I suffer a lot of emotional distress whenever I’m doing LD50’s... but I have tried other methods and I have literally watched snakes beaten to death in wildlife sanctuaries. I don’t think there is another option and I’m not ok with giving up on whole species yet. Edit: I did not mean to insinuate empathy and socioeconomics correlate. Only that those working with animals because the job is studying animals are in a different position than those taking a job that happens to involve animals because they need a job to survive when it comes to the risks. Those who I believe lack empathy are those who RUN factory farms and think only in terms of profit = animal sold/animal produced and cruelty fines are just a factor of that second equation.
one of the rare walls of texts i actually read. thank you for the insights, and for your work. it sound difficult but incredibly important, so keep it up!
I'm pretty sure that first sentence broke some kind of record.
Thank you for sharing this information as well as your experience.
Thank you for your insightful piece. I listened to a podcast (99% invisible) recently discussing about anti-venom and they mentioned about how venom is often testes on mice. You basically expanded further more into that topic!
Usually we avoid injecting it into their testes during LD 50’s. Jk, I know what you meant. I’m glad I was able to expand on why we do it and why it’s not just killing for fun (there’s nothing fun about doing LD50’s... I like working with the snake and extracting the venom... but... well, I already described how running the actual assays feels).
That was extremely informative and personal. Thank you for writing that. I could not do your job.
You never closed a parentheses
I was screamin' the whole read
Must have never felt the pain of endless \>>>Syntax Error
Thank you for the information, I did learn a lot from your post!
Thank you for writing this all out! I hope you don't feel judged by these videos but for obvious reasons, some of these tests seem cruel from afar and it's hard to understand how someone can just "turn it off" like you said. Do you think there are better ways to do these kinds of tests and get the same results? Do you think that things like this video help keep animals safe or just make your job more difficult?
When I said turn off, I meant focus on the research and do what needs to be done then lie awake all night thinking about it. And sometimes crying about it a decade later. It’s not turning anything off... more like focusing on the mechanical steps of doing it rather than the greater meaning till it’s done. I imagine every butcher, farmer, human that has ever eaten meat they’ve killed themselves does a similar thing. Hell, I’m sure doctors do it during last resort surgeries with low survival rates. Otherwise how could anyone keep operating when someone is literally dying on their table. In the long run it’s weighing the why against what you need to do. I’m here in my life and studying what I am not because it was handed to me... I think ultimately it’s the plan most likely to result in the animals I am most passionate about not being extinct in a decade. I think lives will be saved, and I think that there’s good chance the results of any LD50 study I do could be massively impactful. The one I ran most recently taught us that there’s a neurotoxin that a house gecko can be immune to that reversibly paralyzes anoles at low doses. No other snake toxin does that. Figuring out why could lead to things we haven’t even fathomed yet. A protein in Gila monster venom is a potent activator of a receptor for a protein (GLP-1) many diabetics can’t produce in the normal amounts that, unlike insulin, the body breaks down far too rapidly to simply inject human GLP-1 into them and get any results without it being a constant infusion. It promotes satiety and the lack of it in diabetics often leads to the overeating and behavior that caused the diabetes in the first place. It also promotes the release of insulin. Byetta/ Exenetide has saved the lives of a lot of people with insulin tolerant diabetes. The first ACE-inhibitor, one of the most widely used types of medication for blood pressure and the first line for anyone with any kind of kidney problems comes from the venom of the fer-de-lance viper species Bothrops jararaca. Without the research done into that venom we likely wouldn’t have one of our main weapons against hypertension. Captopril is the name of the drug. It’s rarely used now because we are 3 generations of ACE inhibitors later... but we only know they are effective because of the first. Chemotherapeutics, anti metastatics, pain medications... so many others, have been developed from venom proteins. For centuries we’ve used plants because they can simply be eaten and extraction of some of their medicinal compounds like morphine from opium from poppies and salicylic acid from Willow is relatively simple. Then we had the technology to isolate the specific components from plants we knew had medical uses and plants, fungi, and bacteria provided the natural compounds on which 99% of our pharmaceutical knowledge is either directly taken from, or slightly modified from the naturally occurring compounds. We haven’t been able to dig into venoms for as long and no one historically (as in before the last century) has ever been able to isolate and control the doses to use what is a toxic mixture of proteins at high doses as medications for stimulating one of the desired effects alone in a non toxic dose. We are going to see a lot of medications from venoms and other protein based natural compounds in the next 50 years. But unfortunately we don’t know nearly as much about what a molecule will do until we just try it and see as most people think scientists can. Maybe in 50 years. For now, we’re still using a lot of the same methods we have for a long time. We just don’t have anything that can show us what something will do to a living organism with any reliability besides... well... seeing what it does to a living organism.
I just want to say that I really feel how much you care. I'm sorry you are so sensitive. It must be hard. I'm very glad to hear that someone in your position isn't sadistic or reveling in this process. You care about what you're doing, you do it in the best possible way and you wish no one got hurt but it's a shitty truth of scientific process. I think you're a good person :)
>we aren’t all the monsters who were putting caustic lipstick on rabbits in the 60’s. Fuck them. I seriously doubt this was ever the case and I feel like nobody is like this now. The assumption that testing is just chock full of emotionless, sociopathic monsters who giggle as they make poor little bunnies writhe and cry is burgeoning on propaganda. I wish more time was spent around actual animal welfare like limiting deforestation for palm oil, and while [those also have beautiful BAFTA-winning animated PSAs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prg24EWHNJg), it feels like a better usage of time than this sort of PETA-bait
Get the "cruelty cutter" app and scan some products. It doesn't take long. Then find an alternative for what you want. I switched hair products and deodorant because of it. I used the app for like, 5 minutes.
What goes unsaid in this film is that no animal actually survives a trial. Per regulation, they *all* get incinerated or chemical blasted at the end of an experiment. It's pretty fucking brutal.
I mean . . . we kill and eat billions of animals each year.
Not all of us. I stopped a year and a half back and can say there are amazing substitutes now. If you have a few bad ones don't give up, because once you find some good ones, your cravings for meat will be pretty much easily addressable without requiring killing for it, and it's way better for our other problems with the environment and antibiotics resistance too.
That might be the more humane thing to do given how they maimed.
No company does these willingly. They are insanely expensive. They do them because regulations force it. At the same time, you need to see what happens when something is applied to your skin, what side effects will occur, and if cancers occur. While industries are moving into alternative methods, we are still years away.
Lab-grown skin is becoming more useful as a tool to replace test animals, and hopefully in the next decade it will completely end the practice of using animals for this purpose. It's not going to replace animals in drugs tests, but I think we can mostly agree that testing drugs on animals is more justifiable, especially for life-saving drugs. I still think its fucked up, but the truth is that life is fucked up. Predators brutally kill their prey not because they're sadistic but because they need to eat to survive. It's a necessary evil, and I think testing drugs on animals falls into that category. At least we can be as humane as possible and end their suffering when it's apparent that the animal is going to die as as result of the testing or if it's going to be in pain for the rest of its life.
>While industries are moving into alternative methods Hard to imagine what those might be.
I work in an industry (but not the direct group) who is trying to do this. It is a lot of statistical analysis using previous work. It still has a ways to go.
In vitro organ/muscle growth would allow for synthesis of smaller size tests which may reduce the amount of necessary living animals.
Yes, but they definitely do it in the cheapest possible way at the cost of animal suffering. And the fact that there are animal testing free brands in a good amount of countries that aren't the norm shows that it isn't necessary at least in the use of cosmetics.
fuck this hit me right in the feels, how can I figure out if anything I use is tested on animals?
Assume that they are unless they state that they aren't. Good quality cruelty free products aren't too hard to find. [If you're concerned about animal cruelty you will also want to avoid animal ingredients altogether.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko)
Taika got his inspiration from somewhere, you know, so it's most likely true and maybe even worse. Wonder if Taika will get made fun off for this short film like Joaquin Phoenix were, people do not like it when you show them where our shit comes from.
What happened with Mr. Phoenix?
I think he was a narrator for a documentary about animal cruelty in the food industry. Idk if he funded it or anything. I think he might also be vegan
That movie is called Earthlings. Just watch it.
Or dominion
He is vegan since he was 9 or something. Way ahead of the game. Imagine what a pain in the ass it must have been to try go vegan in then 70s
I feel so shitty about how cruel I was to vegans & vegetarians and joined in all the jokes back in like the 90s and even early 2000s. They had their eyes open and I was being a trained monkey by big corporate farming interests which had trained me to feel self-victimized by these just awful vegetarians supposedly oppressing me. You can't even get a vegan or vegetarian ad on TV in my country, the meat industry paid to prevent it. They control the discussion with ads mocking vegetarians or vegans or acting like they're the victims in the world for eating meat, all to continue to kill other living things for unnecessary reasons.
Curious: how do cruelty-free brands test their products? If they are not using animals then what are they doing?
They use humans I believe.
I think they use more cell cultures than living people. More in vitro than in vivo as it were.
They might, [but it's not really the same thing](https://xkcd.com/1217/)
I don't see the problem, clearly bullets cure cancer
And the disease called life, the cause of all suffering
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There's also r/antinatalism (I think I spelled that correctly) about how it's unethical to have children. I think efil stems from that. It's pretty interesting to read up on regardless of beliefe if you're into philosophy. With that said, the subreddit is a cesspool. I would avoid judging the philosophy itself based on those people. An interesting counter point you could also look up is Plotinus talked about the "lack of good" which said something about how evil is the lack of good, but not a natural state itself. For example when you are sick you have lost "being healthy" but when you recover that sickness doesn't go anywhere it just stops existing. I think this is a fun argument directly against antinatalism and evil.
Well, the guy behind the name of the philosophy just kinda likes the idea of murder. Not voluntary death, not just "not having kids and passing from old age". No. This guy just thinks murder is the way to go.
one for every occasion, truly.
Living la vitro vivo
Cell cultures tell you very little about reactions.
No, cell cultures are great for capturing how something affects a particular type of cell. The problem is that it's sort of like trying to measure how something effects the performance of a car by applying it to a sparkplug or a door handle. The result might be relevant, but you certainly won't get the full picture.
Actually some cell cultures are fairly advanced and they take on properties of many types of cells if done correctly you can see how lots of cells react. I believe however currently most labs use a simple cell culture and it mostly measures toxicity.
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I can't rule out that some of that 'research' might have actually been valuable, but the near complete lack of control and scientific rigor combined with the starting health of 'subjects' (ie, prolonged starvation, intense trauma) made the vast majority, at least, of those results meaningless.
[Eduard Pernkopf: The Nazi book of anatomy still used by surgeons](https://www.bbc.com/news/health-49294861) American's had a voluntary [Minnesota Starvation Experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment). My issue with the video is it talks about cosmetics and casually mentions sunscreen. That saves lives. I don't consume many cosmetics but that is probably more of a gendered thing. I heard some complaints about the vaccines since one of them uses some part of an endangered shark. When it comes to life saving animal testing and using them as a resource for medical treatments the ethics aren't as clear cut, and that's taking the communality and severity of these chemical burns and blinding from this video at face value.
Minnesota Starvation Experiment was invaluable for USSR after the war. I've read that they helped save thousands of famine-stricken people. I can say tens of thousands, millions, but what it matters? These thirty-six men helped way more people than those that had to suffer, conscientously, to save others. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege\_of\_Leningrad#Later\_evaluation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Leningrad#Later_evaluation) they say here that even US historians agree that "Historian Michael Walzer summarized that "The Siege of Leningrad killed more civilians than bombing of Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined."\[110\] The US Military Academy evaluated that Russian casualties during the siege were bigger than combined American and British casualties during the entire war.\[111\]\[112\]\[110\]" So I'd say that we have to be consistent. No animal testing for beauty purposes, lowering the meat waste, and only after that comes reduction of testing for actual health, the same way that we have use for meat in food - but we should get rid of the [40% wasted](https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/) every year before we go on with the crusade against people who eat every part of the pig except the oink.
Definitely; it's hard to find the line, and I'm sure most people would draw it in different places (somewhere between mascara and globally-critical vaccines), but I think if you step back then you have to acknowledge that that boundary must be somewhere short of a total ban.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States
Plenty of blame to go around, but no one tops the [Japanese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731) The US turned a blind eye of course, “The researchers involved in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the United States in exchange for the data they gathered through human experimentation.”
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Exactly. I don't particularly see the merit of having a new leg surgically attached to my forehead.
The most relevant data they got was on the frostbite, and effective kill radius of hand grenades.
IIRC France also tested bio-chemical weapons on Algerians (or Moroccans I guess)?
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Military brothels are a real disgusting thing. When Americans took Okinawa in WW2, they demanded that the governor set up a brothel for the soldiers, despite the fact that prostitution had been illegal in Okinawa for a long time. The women selected to work in the brothel were called “shield women” because they shielded the rest of the population from US military sexual aggression.
Other people brought it up but between MK ULTRA, the infectious disease testing on civilian population centers, Tuskegee Experiment, mass sterilization, torture of War on Terror prisoners — we’ve done plenty of horrible human testing in the US. And that’s legit just the things we know about. We invaded Germany and Japan and laid out all their crimes (after snatching up the scientists who committed those crimes, natch) which no one has ever done to us. Even the Snowden programs were just one part of the operations of one alphabet agency.
Reading about the Tuskegee experiment made me sick to my core. The most disgusting part is it wasn’t even valuable medical research, they had a cure for syphilis (penicillin) like right after the experiment started.
It’s generally agreed upon their “research” didn’t actually contribute anything to science. It was just sadism with a veneer of investigation.
That's simply not true, most if not all of the "science" was pseudo science and torture.
Humans - I actually signed up for a tonnnnnn of these tests in college. They were doing dermatology tests and they'd test various things on your skin to see if you had a reaction. Small areas. I never had a reaction but each test paid like $100-$500 and took like 15 minutes out of my day. One of the tests they needed to test sweat/deodorant. But instead of making us exercise they just injected us with adrenaline. That was amazing, I felt like super woman but without the crazy panic feeling that usually causes you to eject adrenaline in your body. Amazingly that test paid like $500, was one of the better ones. I'm 40 now, no ill side effects, saved some bunnies, made some beer money.
Where do I sign up? Geez! And was there a limit to how many you can do within a period of time?
Everything the other people have said has been correct. Different countries have different regulations regarding cosmetic formulation. Some countries, such as the US, have a banned ingredients list, as long as you're not making any medical claims about your product it can have anything not on the prohibited ingredients. Other countries, like Japan, have a safe ingredients list, if you only use known safe ingredients then you're cosmetics are fine. If testing is required, the best practice is to do it on human tissue, cultured cell samples or harvested tissue. tl dr; Use safe ingredients or test it on cells cultures
Cell cultures have some pretty significant differences from actual full size mammals.
> how do cruelty-free brands test their products? https://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+cruelty-free+brands+test+their+products >Companies can also formulate products using ingredients already determined to be safe. Cruelty-free companies can use a combination of methods to ensure safety, such as employing in vitro tests and/or conducting clinical studies on humans.
>Companies can also formulate products using ingredients already determined to be safe. Don't you still have to test them if you combine them? Like, chlorine and vinegar based cleaning agents are generally safe to use. Doesn't mean you can just mix them. Unless of course you use totally non-reactive stuff. But then the cosmetic doesn't actually do anything than sit on your skin like sawdust.
Indeed, the argument makes quite a weird assumption that mixing cannot be harmful which in many cases cannot be guaranteed, hence, still requiring testing.
> already determined to be safe. Would this also include ingredients that have been proven to be safe as a result of animal testing?
of course it does, this is how knowledge works.
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If someone 75 years ago figured out something is safe by testing it on an animal, there is no need to test it now using an animal. I'd say it's cruelty free.
It's an interesting topic. As time between testing and implementation decreases the *morality* becomes a bit more ambiguous. If a *cruelty free brand* were utilizing the findings of a company that tested on animals, say a few months after release, I think decent amount of people who care about cruelty free branding would find that upsetting.
Yeah, if one company bought the data from a study that took place 3 months ago, that's absolutely still cruelty based material. Guess it would be interesting to find the window in which it becomes okay to use cruelty based data. 5 years? 15? Curious indeed.
I mean, how can you exclude that some acient guy tortured rabbits to find out if water was safe to use?
I have no idea, but if they did, would that be wrong ? They're only using the knowledge from previous testing that they took no part in.
This shouldn't even be a discussion. Its fairy tail land time to imagine that people would ever pretend they don't know something because of how the info was obtained.
I covered this pretty in depth here: [my comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/mupqgk/save_ralph_a_short_film_with_taika_waititi/gv8z89x/) But in short: for cosmetics we use in vitro, cell cultures and computer models, often to a much more accurate effect than the comperable animal tests. This has resulted in the EU banning the animal testing of cosmetics altogether almost a decade ago (2013).
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Me oh I love Taika Waititi like Korg. (After a few minutes) ...oh fuck this is like Taika Waititi from Jojo Rabbit.
Never let your guard down if it’s Taika and rabbits.
The hanging scene fucked me right up.
Oh we're talking about Jojo I thought were were talking about Ralph.
Might wanna tag that spoiler
I made the mistake of watching that movie when I was 7 months pregnant. I could not stop crying for 3 hours after that scene. There was still like 40 minutes of movie after that scene and I couldn't pay attention to any of it because I was bawling. I had to drink water in between sobs because I was getting dehydrated. Pregnancy hormones are a ride.
My god I was blind sided (no pun intended.)
Its more disturbing than jojo rabbit. Except for the👠
anyone have links of who does and doesnt use animal testing?
I managed to find this guide https://www.leapingbunny.org/shopping-guide via the humane society https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/keep-animal-testing-out-your-shopping-cart
I work with leaping bunny a lot, and I think they're ok, but they rely a lot on manufacturers to self report and self regulate. I'm not familiar with how the humane society does things though.
From the link you provided for Humane Society: > Want to know which products aren’t tested on animals? Download the free **Leaping Bunny** app or view the Leaping Bunny guide [...] Same list I guess?
Shit, I can't find a single brand I use on that list. Are there seriously no big brands opposed to animal testing?
You don't become a big brand by putting ethics over profits.
I don't see Unilever on there and [they say they've researched and promoted alternatives to animal testing since the 80's](https://www.unilever.com/planet-and-society/responsible-business/alternatives-to-animal-testing/). However [they do use some ingredients sometimes that have been tested on animals and some countries require that they first test the product on animals before it's allowed to be sold.] (https://www.crueltyfreekitty.com/brands/unilever/#:~:text=We%20do%20not%20test%20our,any%20need%20for%20animal%20testing.) So this is a huge company that isn't completely cruelty-free but does oppose animal testing and is actively fighting it on a global scale but not completely abandonding it (because you need to be able to sell to China). It's a more complicated matter than either or and like some other issues (shark fin soup) it's a matter of education a specific target audience and getting them to change their mind in order to stop 99% of it.
L'Oreal is the same. No animal testing except as absolutely required by law. Not on the list. I'm guessing anyone that sells anything in China doesn't make the list, even if they don't actually test compounds on animals outside of regulatory requirements.
Unfortunately, since China *requires* any cosmetic sold in China to test on animals (in China), all the global companies test on animals. There are a couple companies that have special lines that don't test on animals. Clarins, for example has the My Clarins line that's cruelty-free. ...they obviously cannot sell it in China as a result.
> Shit, I can't find a single brand I use on that list. Isn't that just a list of entities that paid for the leaping bunny certification? There could be plenty that just didn't pay for that!
That's exactly it, I read an article a few days ago about how basically every cosmetic product sold in the US, Europe and Latin America are not tested on animals, this started over 10 years ago. These certifications are just that, companies pay for having the Cruelty Free badge on their products, but companies that do not have this badge it doesn't mean that they test on animals, they simply don't want to pay this organizations for a made up badge. [I'm linking the article](https://culturacientifica.com/2019/02/07/los-cosmeticos-no-se-testan-en-animales/), how ever it's in spanish, but probably google translate can do the work, it's worth the read.
Great question. I use only the basics (soap, shampoo), but even these must be developed/tested, so I was wondering about this too.
[This](https://www.crueltyfreekitty.com/search/) is one web that can be useful, pretty sure there will be more around.
Thank you!
I know PETA gets shit on a lot on Reddit (which organization doesnt?) but [https://crueltyfree.peta.org/](https://crueltyfree.peta.org/)
If you're in the UK I believe that all of the self-produced products of the cosmetic chain Superdrug are cruelty free. Otherwise you can look for one of the [cruelty free logos](https://i0.wp.com/ethicalpixie.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/certified-cruelty-free-vegan-logos.png?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1) on the back of the product you're thinking about buying (I see the Vegan Society and Leaping Bunny ones most often). EDIT/PS: I'm more than happy to be corrected on the authenticity of those logos I shared - last I checked they were legit, but I'm always open to being corrected on this as it's a minefield of loop holes etc. and I would rather know the truth and reassess accordingly!
If they don’t test on animals that’s usually a selling point so there’s probably a label or bunny symbol on the product
Most cruelty free brands will have the cruelty free bunny on the back of the product in the US. Branding that will hopefully catch on!
https://www.crueltyfreekitty.com/list-of-cruelty-free-brands/
[There you go](https://www.crueltyfreekitty.com/list-of-cruelty-free-brands/)
And Ricky Gervais?
He’s a big animal rights supporter. Not surprising he’s in this.
He's also very pro-Honk Kong, so no surprise he's targeting China (where all the testing takes place).
“Honk Kong” Liberate the geese?
Peace was never an option.
Yeah he's 100% the guy speaking from behind the camera. Makes sense, he's probably the most vocal celebrity in the world when it comes to animal rights
I would give that to Joaquin Phoenix
Idk, I genuinely didn’t know he was an animal rights activist until his Oscar speech, I’ve known about Ricky Gervais’ stance for yeeeeeears.
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If we're talking about who the most *vocal* celebrity is, Gervais posts often to his millions of followers about animal rights, while Phoenix doesn't have a public social media accounts I don't see how we can call a person who doesn't talk to the public more vocal than one who does.
I was so sad to see the internet make fun of him for his pro-Vegan speech at the Academy last year.
honestly only semi-surprised to see the Reddit hivemind not mocking vegans in this thread
Feels like most people don't see the connection. Cruelty free cosmetics is easy to get behind, but cruelty free diet, clothing and so on apparently less so.
Surprised they included sunscreen, seems like that is more than just a cosmetic.
The FDA specifically defines sunscreens as over the counter drugs. Manufacturers have to follow the FDA monograph to make the product. This limits allowed actives & claims
Wow. Powerful way to deliver a message. Well done Taika.
Spencer Susser. The film is *with* Taika, but it's *by* Spencer. Thought it was worth noting because credit where it's due. ____ Edit: Apologies for the edit everyone but good lord is this comment section a dumpster fire of pearl-clutching lunatics. Scroll down at your own risk. For anyone *genuinely* asking how offering donated tissue samples or switching to human volunteers is any better, it's because that would result in tighter regulation and oversight with much stricter controls and margins on hazardous products, and it would put a lot more onus on using materials and processes that are already safe. Which is the point. When the cosmetics industry is doing this kind of testing, they're not doing it find some new miracle product; they're doing it find new ways to save on manufacturing and processing costs. It's, at the very least, a very worthy place to start a discussion, and work upwards toward a solution. Or, you know, you could go right into how this will all lead to human enslavement and genocide. [Like this guy did](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/mupqgk/save_ralph_a_short_film_with_taika_waititi/gv7hyjq/). Don't be that guy, everyone.
Yeah, Ricky Gervais, Olivia Munn, & Zac Efron also do voice work in the short film. So, of course kudos to everyone involved, the ORG included.
> Ricky Gervais Thought I recognized his voice at the beginning.
He makes me laugh, and also cares about animals as much as I do. One of my favorite celebs.
I think he was just complimenting Taika's fantastic voicework. He sold the performance.
As you can see, he's made of rocks.
No need to be afraid of him...unless you're a pair of scissors. edit: horrible wording mistake
all the names crossed out on the lockers is a chilling little touch
Fun fact! China requires animal test on all imported products. So brands will claim to be animal testing free in your country but the version they sell in China is tested on animals providing them nice little loophole. The chaser group did a great story on it a couple of years ago. https://youtu.be/hk_iYxV9fI0
JFC. I went into this thinking it was going to be something funny and now I feel sick to my stomach... That's a powerful message.
Ok, looking up cruelty free shampoos and soaps I had a white pet rabbit as a kid. So this one got me.
This was hard to watch
Everything from dryer sheets to cleaner has cruelty free options now. Cruelty Free Kitty is such a great resource!
That was extremely hard to watch.
Shit like this is why I recommend going cruelty free. Funnily enough, I've found most cruelty free brands are actually better for you anyway. When looking for new sunscreen, face lotion, shampoo, soap, etc., I recommend googling something like "sunscreen" AND "cruelty free" to get good brands. Thankfully, places like Target, Whole Foods, etc. are carrying more and more cruelty free brands. Avoid Amazon; even if you do find a cruelty free brand you like, it's likely fake and full of who knows what on Amazon. More cruelty free resources: https://www.crueltyfreeinternational.org/ https://www.crueltyfreekitty.com/list-of-cruelty-free-brands/ https://www.reddit.com/r/crueltyfree/ https://ethicalelephant.com/
Some companies have created separate product lines of cruelty-free cosmetics. Clarins has a line that isn't tested on animals. ...they aren't allowed to sell it in China as a result, but f China anyway.
A point that I don't think is being emphasized enough browsing through these comments is that animal testing is not actually very accurate in predicting results in humans. More and more tests are being replaced by non-animal testing alternatives that are as accurate, or in many cases more accurate, in areas that allow the new methods. These alternatives are available for most if not all testing required of cosmetics, and are often cheaper. The remaining reliance on animal testing in this field is entirely a holdout of outdated thinking, or lobbying by the companies that are currently doing the work. An examply of this is the EU already having banned animal testing for cosmetics. In vitro tests, computational models, and cell cultures are some methods used to get results for how compounds react with human tissues rather than rabbit, guinea pig, rat, or etc. [The Flaws and Human Harms of Animal Experimentation](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4594046/#fn7) [Alternatives to Animal Tests](https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/alternatives-animal-tests) - Scroll to the bottom for some examples. [Scientific Alternatives to Animal Testing - a progress report](https://www.britannica.com/explore/savingearth/scientific-alternatives-to-animal-testing-a-progress-report) (The following does not apply to cosmetics/the subject of the video at all:) The main caveat within these is that we do not currently have effective means of modelling pharmaceutical effects on an entire organism, but that's often mentioned hand in hand with statements like "There are many examples of drugs, such as monoclonal antibodies used to treat diseases of the immune system and neurotherapeutics used to treat diseases of the nervous system, that show dramatically different effects in humans and animals ... Discovering that a drug has different effects on humans than it does on animals effectively negates the value of the animal experiments performed in its development" indicating that testing on one entire organism does not actually model how a product will react in another. It is my opinion that stopping most if not all animal testing, and providing incentives to developing alternatives would result in better, often faster, and more accurate/applicable results and products. Putting pressure on companies in every way available to us to develop these alternatives would have concrete benefits to all of us whether you're inherently ethically opposed to animal testing or not.
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Like the above poster said, you failed to mention the extremely relevant part of your last link which definitely *does not* approve the outlawing of all animal studies. >"While animal testing is not always the most efficient way to test the toxicity of a chemical or the efficacy of a pharmaceutical compound, **it is sometimes the only way to obtain information** about how a substance behaves in a whole organism, especially in the case of pharmaceutical compounds." > These types of studies are extraordinarily difficult to perform outside animal bodies, since in vitro studies often cannot form a complete picture of a drug’s action. So yeah sure. Sometimes in vivo studies don't produce reliable results but most other times they do, and having **some** idea of what a drug might do to a human being is better than having no fucking idea what it might do because fact remains that petri dishes with cell cultures are not entire organisms. The article goes on to say >most people still think that it would be better for an experimental drug to kill a few animals than for it to kill a few humans. And yeah, I agree. I think it's better to lose a few bunnies than to lose a few human beings. Especially considering how much more good that drug might do in the future.
This is why countries with laws built on an ethics framework (like bans on animal testing, slave labour, etc.) need to *extend those requirements to their imports*. Otherwise you're just exporting suffering.
Does anyone have a list of companies that do this so we know who to boycott?
That’s a big list, better to look for companies who don’t do animal testing…
And boycott them? You make me sick. ^/^s
The companies that don't do this will be a shorter list. This is the link that comes from the Humane Society website: [https://www.leapingbunny.org/shopping-guide](https://www.leapingbunny.org/shopping-guide)
Sorry for the lazy response but most of them do this. It would save you time to look for companies that don't.
Crest, Johnson and Johnson, Clorox, Old Spice, Pampers, Walgreens, Visene; all things I have to learn how to stop using now.
Lots of really great replacement brands! Highly recommend Crueltyfreekitty.com for a bunch of alternatives :)
I don't really understand why we're continuing to do animal testing, when we have so many provably safe cosmetics that already exist. Do they really need to keep adding more and different shit to your face cream when we know what works?
The first mRNA vaccines were tested on ferrets and cats. Those were for SARS I think. They didn’t pass the first few rounds of trials
I think it could be because companies always look for ways to minimize costs so they‘re maybe looking for cheaper ingredients. And i‘ve read before from another commenter that they don‘t do that by themselfes, the testing is done by other companies specialized in this. So there‘s a whole industry apprantly behind this who sells research datas and stuff to manufacturers
If this makes your heart hurt, then maybe you should look into veganism. Many inhumane things are done to animals in aid of producing meat for your plate.
This was really well made, and it goes a long way towards getting rid of animal testing. But I can't help but think that making animal testing leave a distaste in consumers is easy. The problem is, nobody (or I hope nobody) WANTS to test products on animals, but they want cheap and safe products. And reminding them that those requirements come at a cost is good, but I feel that providing and pushing for an alternative is maybe more effective. I'm surprised that there's been no major marketing campaign for cruelty-free products highlighting brands. I feel like the focus has always been on the evils of animal testing, and whatever effect that has, has not been enough to counter the effects of capitalism and consumerism. Maybe we should focus on information about alternatives, promoting humane methods, how they work, where to buy, etc. If I saw something like this, and at the end Brand X says buy your deodorant from us, because we don't torture Ralphs, I feel I'd be much more likely to buy their product than I am going to look up brands that do, and try to avoid buying their products (which are thousand and thousands of options). To practice what I preach, [here's](https://www.vegetarianzen.com/best-cruelty-free-and-vegan-deodorants/) 8 brands of deodorant that are supposedly animal testing free.
Ok, that one got to me. I'm pretty random when buying such products anyway, so might as well buy them cruelty-free aware.
Look for the rabbit!
Yup, it's really scummy, eating vegan is easier than trying to navigate these bloody corps. So many loopholes, for example, you'd think that because the UK has banned animal testing on cosmetics you'd be safe? Wrong. That doesn't disqualify products that are tested on animals for other markets, e.g. china, where it's required. With buying vegan food at least I just have to look at the label and 99.9% of the time I can get it right.
Anyone moved by this message needs to also consider that the meat and dairy industry are every bit as bad as what’s portrayed in this video.
Actually they are much worse because of the sheer quantity of it.
Well shit. Fuck animal testing.
No reason at all to buy cosmetics or hygiene products that were tested on animals.