I want to take a few moments to speak with you all about something that may not affect your everyday life but is nevertheless going on all the time. It is cruel, inhumane and wrong. We need to do what we can to stop animal testing. I am vehemently opposed to animal testing in several fundamental ways:
1) CRUEL
I read that in Germany, they subject kennels full of dachshunds to standardized tests such as the SAT, MCAT, LSAT and more. These poor little dogs can hardly hold a number two pencil and yet their little paws are pressed down on scantron sheets for hours with few breaks for water and walkies. These loving, unquestioning and loyal canines are then forced to apply to schools that, quite frankly, most of them can’t afford without financial aid, which is scarce in the German university system. Most of them will never even be accepted.
2) NEEDLESS
These tests are not adjusted to determine animal aptitude. They are, therefore wildly inaccurate and irrelevant in their results. Is it really an indication of a “superior” animal when the critter has attended an extensive test prep course or instead simply an example of “teaching to the test”? When a cheetah, the fastest land animal, is unable to finish a test in the alotted time, has the cat failed or has the system failed in its inflexibility? Should a horse raised in the country and a monkey raised in a city pet shop be given the same word problems? What do we actually learn from animal testing?
3) UNFAIR
Do you think these tests are fair to all the animals who are subjected to them? Ask “Pretty Roy”, a dyslexic myna bird from the East Indies, who can barely squawk out “Roy wants a Karcker.” without embarrassment and humiliation by the other birds, let alone apply the Pythagorean theorem correctly to geometry problems. How about Clive, a Portuguese boa constrictor, who does not even speak English as a first language? How does Clive or any other non-native reptile make reading comprehension commentary or classic literary analysis on a text written for another culture, and often written in a completely different time period, long before they were ever born and/or hatched?
Let’s think out of the box here. Please let’s let go of old interspecies educational paradigms. These varmints, pooches, kitties, serpents, rodents and marsupials alike deserve our love and respect. They are our cuddly companions not guinea pigs for our curricular convenience. (Unless they are actually Guinea Pigs.) Instead of taking your cute, lop-eared albino bunny to a tutor for work on its vocabulary, maybe spoil the little fellow for a day at the spa. Get the little man a shampoo, get his little nails painted, maybe treat him to some fancy and expensive mascara or eye shadow. People who say they can’t really tell if an animal is happy or sad have never looked closely at the smile of a rabbit wearing a fabulous shade of Yves Saint Laurent lipstick.
spence.
Ha. Ha. I’m so clever, but seriously, stop fucking with the animals with product testing.
They didn’t ask for it and if they could, they wouldn’t.
spencerhumm 