One day I was scrolling through tik tok and came across this video with the caption “Save Ralph '. It’s a very popular video anyone can look up on the internet and other social media. This animated four-minute clip of a bunny is trying to spread awareness of animal testing effects and that it’s a current issue going on. With the statistics of these innocent animals that are being used for companies' benefits, we need to find a solution. This is animal cruelty that businesses are in the blame for, this needs to stop. I’m going to be moving on to talk about the statistics, why I don’t think they need to be tested, and a possible solution.

The statistics of animal testing is so sad to hear. Animal testing is all over the place, there are around twenty-two million animals being tested each year in America. With all those animals, not many survive. The survival rate is about three percent which means the other ninety-seven percent die just for the company's advantages. What’s surprising is that the animals are not dying from the labs, they are dying from the organizations that kill them so they can look into their organs and tissue to see the effects of the products. They kill the animals by carbon dioxide asphyxiation, neck-breaking, decapitation, or other means. The most commonly tested animals include mice, fish, rats, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, farm animals, birds, cats, dogs, mini-pigs, and non-human primates (monkeys, and in some countries, chimpanzees). “Out of five hundred brands, a hundred and ninety (thirty-eight percent) animal tests,” said the website Peta updated in 2022. Companies need to stop being selfish just for their needs.

With all these saddening statistics, why are these innocent animals still being tested? Some say it's used for the purpose of medical treatments, determining toxic medicine, and checking the safety of human-used products. Which I find helpful because it determines the safety of these products people use. But I do think that there could be another way to do so without hurting these animals. Well, then these animals don't even have a good survival rate in these labs. The pain, suffering, and death of these individuals are not worth the possible human benefits. Even though these labs may have some human benefits, animal testing has really never worked. “Ninety percent of medications proven safe by animals have later been very harmful and had negative effects on humans' ' stated ProCon on 3/18/2020. So if animal testing is unreliable, why does it continue? Despite this growing evidence that it is time for a change, effecting that change within a scientific community that has relied for decades on animal models as the “default method” for testing and research takes time and perseverance.

With all these animals suffering, we need to find a way testing can be stopped. So what ways can it be stopped, or what's an alternative? “If lack of human relevance is the fatal flaw of animal models, then a switch to human-relevant research tools is the logical solution” was stated by Humane Society International on October 12th, 2012. The National Research Council in the United States has expressed its vision of “a not-so-distant future in which virtually all routine toxicity testing would be conducted in human cells or cell lines”, and science leaders around the world have echoed this view. Scientists can use computers to interpret and integrate this information with data from human and population-level studies. The resulting predictions regarding human safety and risk are potentially more relevant to people in the real world than animal tests. Another way we can 

help to stop testing is by buying animal cruelty-free products. Cleaning, beauty, and cosmetic products are the main ones. The bigger brands that test are L'Oreal, Estee Lauder, Procter & Gamble, Clorox, Johnson & Johnson, S.C. Johnson, Colgate-Palmolive, Reckitt Benckiser, Church & Dwight, Unilever, and Henkel, but that's just a few of many. If we start buying more cruelty-free products, brands will start realizing their sales are going down and will want to do something to change that. We need to stop purchasing and supporting brands that do so. We can also start banning animal testing in more states. There are only five states that have banned it so far such as; California, Illinois, Nevada, Virginia, and Maryland.

In conclusion, after watching the animated four-minute clip called “Save Ralph”. It had the animated bunny show viewers the negative effects it has on animals and the conditions it puts them in. The clip made me have a realization that animal testing is a serious worldwide problem. It needs to be stopped and we need to help by finding solutions and alternatives that don’t help aid the organizations. Animal experiments are part of medical history, but history is where they belong.