animal ingredients vs animal testing
Posted by rainbowdust919 on Aug 10, 2008 · Member since Nov 2004 · 1198 posts
i don't know if this has been debated before but imagine this hypothetical situation:
say you have your choice between two almost identical products (personal care products, cleaning products, whatever).
one has no animal ingredients but it was tested on animals.
the other was not tested on animals but has at least one animal ingredient (like milk protein, honey, silk protein, gelatin, etc).
which do you pick? why?
and you cannot say "neither" because the point of this is to think and obviously ideally most of us would probably say that we'd do without.
i'm interested in what people would pick & why.
debate!
animal ingredient, depending on what the ingredient is. i can do beewax sometimes, (not ideally) but if its that or POISON, i'll do bw.
i'll just say: castile soap.
what does castile soap have in it? isn't it just vegetable oils & vegetable glycerins?
...bw? ???
I'd say the ingredient. It just seems like the lesser evil to me - usually these ingredients are by products of the 'food animal' industry, (ie not the main purpose of the industry). As well, it seems pointless to me to test products on animals because humans are human, and regardless of how similar we may be to something like a rat, we still can (and do!) react differently to things than they do. I especially don't understand things like testing skin/hair products on rabbits - their skin is WAY more sensitive & delicate than humans', so how does it help us know whether we'll react to it or not? This is (obviously) in addition to the less than desirable housing/general treatment of 'lab animals'. It just seems to me there are other ways to do these things that make more sense.
So far I've been vegan mainly food-wise. Although, I recently have been using everything Lush in the bathroom, so very little of my 'cosmetic' stuff is non-vegan. If only it were less costly and easier to find :P one day.
i agree with the other two people. i would go with the ingredient.
the lab animals are treated soo sooo sooooo horribly, and i really feel that they are treated even worse than their industry farm friends.
i do my best to avoid both things... but if the only options i find for a certain product that i need are an item with an animal ingredient but no testing, an item with no animal ingredients but tested, or an item that was tested on animals and has an animal ingredient... then i'd go with the item that had an animal ingredient but was not tested on animals.
i would feel better about that one, although ideally i'd like it to have no animal ingredients or testing.
and i agree with tino... i've always said that it didn't make sense that we tested human products on animals because although they may react one way on an animal that doesn't mean that it will react the same way on us. that would be like using permanent hair dye on a rabbit since we know it's safe for humans. it would probably either kill or severely injure a rabbit!
i just don't think it's very effective to test them on animals... that's how we end up with stuff like fen-phen! and i don't know if everyone on here remembers fen-phen, but that stuff was just wonderful! (total sarcasm, of course)
I would go with the animal ingredient a million times before ever purchasing a product that was tested on animals. Animal testing is barbaric!