how can we avoid animal testing
Answers
Answer:
1. Always buy cruelty-free products.
Cruelty-free cosmetics and household products abound. If you aren’t sure whether or not your favorite brands drip chemicals into rabbits’ eyes, check out PETA’s comprehensive database. There have been a number of advancements in non-animal research methods, so there’s no excuse for sick and twisted experiments on animals. Also, you can order PETA’s cruelty-free shopping guide, which is great to hand out to friends, family, local salons, spas, and hotels.
2. Educate others.
Don’t leave people in the dark about the horrors of the animal experimentation industry. Knowledge is power, so educate them by sharing PETA’s “Animal Testing in 60 Seconds Flat” video. Brush up on the facts so that if any questions arise, you’ll be the best animal defender you can be.
3. Always speak up about classroom dissection.
If someone you know is asked to cut up an animal in a class, encourage him or her to say NO! Humane, more cost-effective, and superior alternatives are available, and schools everywhere are catching on. If an educator gives him or her a hard time, let us help. We’re pretty good at standing up for animals!
4. Make a donation.
Lots of charities ask for money and say they’re working on a cure for a disease. However, behind the scenes, that money could be contributing to immense suffering. If you have money to give, make certain you only donate to charities that don’t fund or conduct experiments on animals.
5. Leave your body to science.
Speaking of donating, consider leaving your body to science to help scientists, doctors, and medical students advance their research and training without hurting animals. You won’t have any use for it, and wouldn’t it be lovely to know that even after you’re gone, you can still help animals? PETA President Ingrid Newkirk thinks so, and she’s donating her body to help animals as well—although in a much more gruesome fashion.
6. Share this page!
Imagine the impact if all your friends and family did everything on this page. By sharing this information on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites, you’ll have the potential to reach thousands of people and help stop animal testing! Let’s make that dream a reality. So please, for the animals, share this page using the buttons below.
If the models indicate that a substance may have unwanted side effects, then you can accelerate relevant experimental studies of them to ‘eliminate’ poor drug candidates before investing large sums in them. Such targeting could potentially remove the need for animal testing.
Eva Bay Wedebye
”These models can be used early on in e.g. the development of a new drug. You only need to have the chemical structure of your substance described on a piece of paper, and then you can run it through the models,” says Eva Bay Wedebye, a chief adviser at the Division of Toxicology and Risk Assessment at the National Veterinary Institute, the Technical University of Denmark (DTU VET).
“If the models indicate that a substance may have unwanted side effects, then you can accelerate relevant experimental studies of them to ‘eliminate’ poor drug candidates before investing large sums in them. Such targeting could potentially in certain situations remove the need for animal testing.”
Prior to the arrival of the QSAR models, this kind of information could only be arrived at through animal testing, so in this way the models are an important step towards reducing the number of animal experiments.
However, the method is not perfect. It can only be as good as the data in the database and will always be associated with some uncertainty. Nevertheless, the certainty increases as the database continues to grow.
Fewer animal trials – a lucky side effect
I am convinced that in ten years from now this will be entirely incorporated into our experimental methods.
Eva Bay Wedebye
The initial purpose of using these models was not to reduce the number of animal trials; this was just a lucky coincidence. The models were initially developed to make it easier to figure out if chemicals can be harmful to health.
This is also why the QSAR research group at DTU is working together with the Danish Ministry of the Environment. But the QSAR models remain a good alternative to animal testing, which would otherwise be necessary to determine the toxicity of unknown substances.
Unfortunately, many test animals are being used in other types of research, for instance in basic research. Here, too, scientists have come up with alternatives, one of which looks at the type of bacteria the animals have in their intestines.
Intestinal bacteria in mice explain test results
If you know the composition of bacteria in the intestines of your experimental mice, you can make do with only half as many mice. This may sound a bit odd, but the explanation is that the intestinal bacteria in the mice play a big role.
QSAR (Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships) is a collective term for a number of models that compare the chemical structure of known organic substances with unknown substances. If, for example, we know that a certain substance causes hormonal imbalance, there is a great risk that similar substances do the same.
“If you screen the intestinal flora in experimental mice and pick only those that respond best, you can do with only those in your experiment. This can in some cases mean a halving of the number of mice, and in other cases even more,” says Axel Kornerup Hansen, a professor at the Department of Veterinary Disease Biology at the University of Copenhagen, who is also on the board of a newly-created centre that promotes alternatives to animal testing.
In one experiment, Hansen’s research group could explain up to 70-80 percent of the variation in how mice responded to having an allergenic product put on their ear – based only on their intestinal flora.
This means that the bacterial mix that the mice have in their stomachs greatly determines how their ear responds to contact with an allergenic substance.
A lot of money to be saved