Save Ralph awareness
By: María Paula Marín 10ºB
On March the 12th, the Humane Society International released a short film called “Save Ralph”. The four-minute film combines an empathic storytelling global campaign to outlaw cosmetic animal testing once and for all, with the magic of stop-motion animation. In just a matter of hours, it became a viral success with half a million visits on YouTube and hundreds of millions of reproductions on social networks with the impulse of translations created by the public in Portuguese, Spanish, French and Vietnamese.
“Save Ralph'' is a wake-up call that animals are still suffering from cosmetics, and now is the time to come together to ban them globally. Today we have a host of reliable, animal-free approaches to ensuring product safety, so there is no excuse to make animals like Ralph suffer when testing cosmetics or their ingredients,” stated Jeffrey Flocken, president of the Humane Society International.
Although animal testing is prohibited in 40 countries, there are yet still many places in the world where it is perfectly legal. The harmful use of animals in experiments is not only cruel but also often ineffective. Animals do not get many of the human diseases that people do, such as major types of heart disease, many types of cancer, HIV, Parkinson’s disease, or schizophrenia. Instead, signs of these diseases are artificially induced in animals in laboratories in an attempt to mimic the human disease. However, such tests disparage the complexity of human conditions which are influenced by wide-ranging factors such as hereditary qualities, socio-economic variables, deeply rooted mental issues and diverse individual encounters. As a matter of fact, 90% of drugs fail in human trials despite promising results in animal tests. Not only is experimenting on them cruel, but also expensive because it is a delayed process that requires many animals. We should all join the animal rights movement, because these kinds of practices should be completely eradicated. Animals shouldn’t be put through this much pain; at the end of the day, humans are the ones who will be using the products we test on them.
In order to join this movement, we must start investing in cruelty free brands. Companies that don’t test on animals are completely reliable because they use replacing techniques such as experimenting on cell cultures and/or human volunteers. Additionally, computer models and epidemiological studies have helped the pharmacological industry be even more accurate with its testing. Each time you are about to buy a new product, check if it has any of the official cruelty free bunny logos. If what you are buying doesn’t have a logo, you can always use an app to scan its barcode and check. Apps like “Happy Bunny” and “Cruelty Cutter” will help you do the job.
https://www.hsi.org/saveralphmovie/
https://warp.la/save-ralph-experimentacion-animal-207067
https://www.crueltyfreeinternational.org/why-we-do-it/arguments-against-animal-testing