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kalikshama -> RE: Ethical Shopping (8/23/2011 3:30:36 PM)
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When Reese Witherspoon's character in Legally Blonde 2 takes on the cosmetics-testing industry, everyone in the audience roots for her success against the cruel animal experimenters. In real life, too, most people agree that smearing hair color into a rabbit's eye and pumping shampoo into a guinea pig's stomach is idiotic. The European Union recently made its distaste for the practice public policy by voting to phase out all consumer-product testing on animals.
In the U.S., most people believe that this is a battle we won years ago. They are wrong, and their mistaken belief that no one kills animals in order to produce new cosmetics or toiletries means that they have stopped using their consumer dollars to protest this most despicable animal abuse. If we are to achieve the goal of the EU (and Witherspoon's character)—an end to the use of animals in product testing—this must change.
...there are holdouts in the consumer-product industry. They are huge multiproduct manufacturers, including Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, and others, driven by fear of lawsuits (though animal tests have not proved effective in a company's defense when a consumer sues) and, inexplicably, inertia. Their reluctance to change in the face of consumer demand and superior non-animal test methods is difficult to understand, but one company CEO once told me that companies that continue to blind and poison animals do so simply because they have always done so and don't have the vision to try a new and better way. "And," he added, "they don't want to prove PETA right."
http://www.peta.org/living/beauty-and-personal-care/Blinding-Rabbits-for-Beauty.aspx
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