Veggieness
Animal Testing
Humans: Terrible.
Back when we were fretting about whether or not to take non-veggie medicine, we happened upon the inconvenient truth that even if medicines are veggie by ingredient, they still have to be tested on animals. This gives us the kind of moral clustercuss we live for: People can think animal testing is wrong for cosmetics even if they eat meat, or necessary for medicine even if they’re vegan. It’s a battleground for greyed areas, doubled standards, wrung hands and hypocrisies. Let’s see if we can make some sense of it all.
Why are animals tested on?
Animals have long been test subjects for human cosmetics, medicines, cleaning products, food additives and industrial and agricultural products. We’ve also shot them into space a few times. What happens to them and why depends on where they are in the world. In the UK and EU right now, animal testing has been banned for cosmetic products. In China, the US and elsewhere, animals are still suffering for the sake of lipstick.
The why is fairly obvious even while its validity is contested: Before products hit the market they must be proven to be safe for human use. And this isn’t just about yer cancer or yer AIDS or avoiding another thalidomide. This is also about pet food and toilet cleaner and Botox.
What are we talking about here?
In the UK, legislation allows for procedures that are likely to cause an animal “pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm.” They can be done without anaesthetic or analgesic if using them would mess with the object of the experiment. That’s comfortably abstract. Let’s get specific.
Cruelty Free International has been knocking about for more than 100 years, proving it’s either dedicated to the cause of ending animal testing or fairly useless at doing it. Their undercover investigation of Botox testing revealed hundreds of mice every week were poisoned, injected with a strong enough dose of botulinum toxin that they had a 50 percent chance of being killed. Scienticians looked on as mice became paralysed, gasped for air, and suffocated to death. Undercover filming showed survivors being killed after their usefulness was done, lab assistants breaking their necks by pressing down on them with ballpoint pens. When killing them in large numbers, they used gas chambers instead. And this is Botox we’re talking about. Thousands of animals tortured and killed so Donald Trump’s ex-wives can look like trampolines that are simultaneously 12 and 94 years old.
How many are we talking about here?
Cruelty Free International reckons in 2015 about 192 million animals were experimented on. In the UK alone, in 2021 there were more than 3 million experiments on more than 1.6 million animals. And that wasn’t just mice: Fish, birds, rats, horses, non-human primates, cats and dogs were also tortured on our behalf. Dogs! Fucking dogs! And every one of them a good boy!
Hard science: hard
When figuring what to do about this there’s an issue more scientific than my brain can handle: Whether animal testing actually serves a purpose. This is a vital point for us to grasp because for many, animal testing is seen as a necessary evil. But if you take the ‘necessary’ out of ‘necessary evil’ you’re left with… y’know. Evil.
Unfortunately, on the one side you have scientists talking about stuff I don’t understand, and on the other you have animal rights activists claiming to know better than the scientists talking about stuff I don’t understand. Both have obvious biases, making it difficult to understand or trust anything that’s said by anyone.
Pro-vivisection scientists say animal testing is vital to developing safe medicines for humans, citing example after example including penicillin which was dismissed until tested on mice to prove its effect. Anti-vivisection campaigners say animals are so different to humans that testing on them is unreliable and largely irrelevant, citing example after example including penicillin which in large doses kills guinea pigs.
Then there’s the question of alternatives. Cruelty Free International and PETA suggest using computer models, cell cultures, stem cells, donated human tissue, volunteer studies and microdosing. Others say they’re all limited in usefulness and are only complementary methods of testing to be included alongside animal tests.
I could stand on a stepladder at the top of the Himalayas and this would still be over my head. Let’s get back to morality; we know what we’re doing there.

Photo by Jacob Buchhave on Unsplash
Degrees of awfulness
If morality is on a sliding scale, animal testing is all over the shop. A recent survey of me suggests I think animal testing for cosmetics is disgusting, animal testing for cleaning products is stupid, animal testing for Botox is disgustingly stupid, and animal testing for medicines is… a little tricky.
I thought we’d made our peace with medicine. Turns out there’s an uneasy ceasefire, and border skirmishes between me and Lemsip are doing little to ease tensions. We’ve accepted medicine might have bits of animal in it and either we take it knowingly or stay sicker for longer. The same goes animal testing. Where the law demands all medicines are tested on animals there’s no choosing one over another as there is with one toilet cleaner over another. If an HIV vaccine comes along it will have been tested on animals. Either we take it or we don’t.
What we need, as with most things, is not individual choice but systemic change. We need alternatives to animal testing so we don’t have to choose between life (ours) and death (theirs).
What to do, what to do
We may not be scientific types but we are not powerless. When it comes to cosmetics, household products and anything non-mediciney we can choose carefully to ensure we’re not buying things that have been tested on animals. We can check product databases from Cruelty Free and PETA. We can get stuck into their campaigns to ban cosmetics testing beyond the UK and EU. If we think we know what we’re talking about we can work to ban all animal testing, including for medical research.
Completely avoiding things tested on animals isn’t an option right now unless you’re willing to die for the principle, but it may be an option in a future of our making.
Photo credit: Creative Commons Stock Photos (header image)
THE GUIDE
Definitions
Vegans, vegetarians, carnivores, omnivores, pescatarians, flexitarians, fruitarians… Every one of these tedious knobs explained so you can decide which you’re going to be, starting now.
My Life As A Hypocrite
How a spider spurred my veggie awakening and with it my wider Zero awakening and with it your wider Zero awakening and with it a general saving of animals, humanity and the planet.
Levelling up
How, why and which I went vegan. Well, not which. But how and why. And which you should too.
WHY THOUGH
Six solid reasons for going veggie. Each of them so convincing you’ll be mortified you haven’t done it already.
YEAH BUT
Lies, myths and tiresome bullshit about veggieness and veganism
Gelatine and the Newbie Pitfalls
Bits of animals are hidden everywhere: in marshmallows, in red food dye, in fake fingernails, even in meat and fish and everything. Swot up on what you need to miss out on.
In search of protein
I scream, you scream, we all scream for protein. Let’s just calm down and eat some. It’s basically everywhere.
What's The Deal With Eggs?
Prepare yourself for the dullest of dull questions meat-eaters will ask you, armed with a bit of knowledge and a lot of spunk.
Veggie medicine
Because even being ill is an ethical pickle for the self-righteous vegetarian. Between gelatine capsules and mandatory animal testing, you’re best just maintaining perfect health forever.
Veggie Pets
What should we feed our fellow omnivores? Should we force our morality on other creatures? Will a leopard ever want a bit of tofu? Just three of the questions I’m not all that into but wrote about anyway.
Veggie Kids
I believe the children are the future. The pale, listless future.
Animal testing
Putting lipstick on a pig. And shoving botox in a mouse. And giving a bunch of animals a ton of tumours.
THE BLOG
Veganuary beganuaried
As Veganuary hit and I finished updating the Veggieness section of this here website, I was lightning-bolted by one of my many micro-epiphanies: Ever since Covid demanded I spend less time in the kitchen and more time in bed I’ve become a lousy, lazy vegan.
Veganuary: What, why, how, when and who
Veganuary aims to get people trying veganism for a month, drawing them in with time-limited new year faddishness. Last year it had more than half a million sign ups, with about 85% committing to cutting down on meat and dairy thereafter, and a solid 40% aiming to stay vegan for all time. That’s decent, given the most popular new year’s resolution – getting and using an annual gym membership – has a success rate of less than 3% I assume.
Soyless Green
As with many hells, the road to veganism is paved with good intentions…
Stem in a teacup? Celling out? (It’s been a while)
You’ll recall they made a stem cell burger a while back. It was funded by one of the guys from Google taking a break off reading your emails and spying on what you spaff to. He gave a few hundred grand to a couple of mad scientists taking a break off stitching hitchhikers’ mouths to hobos’ bumholes.
Mr Zero’s unfeasibly grand re-veggiefication scheme: part two
As you’ll recall I’ve been terribly ill, mummy’s brave little soldier keeping his chin up through the flu, a chest infection, a spot of whooping cough and very little in the way of blogging. Throughout this charming episode I’ve had a number of very helpful people explain it’s all down to my vegetarianism, there having been no documented cases of illness among meat eaters.
Mr Zero’s unfeasibly grand re-veggiefication scheme: part one
In the days before my epic post-qualifying/pre-job slouchfest, back when I was an overworked and increasingly tetchy student, I bashed out a few new year’s resolutions to fill up a bit of space on what was becoming a seriously neglected blog. However, comeuppances being what they are, I’m now forced to put some effort into doing whatever it was I said I’d do, and all to satisfy an audience of precisely no one. How I hate myself.
Operation Parmesan: It begins
As the days count down and 2011 draws to a close I have some unfinished business to attend to, an outstanding resolution yet to be instood. I speak, of course, of Operation Parmesan, the unprecedented assault on the world of cuisine that will make the Hiroshima bombing look like an inappropriate historical event to make reference to.
And The Jetsons melted down Rosie for kicks
It’s a hard and trying task, all this Zero business. All this research, all this protesting, all this motivating the troops and doing the groupies. At times I grow weary. People cannot live on self-righteousness alone. It can’t be all hard work and hand wringing and so from time to time I put down my tools, tramp down from the moral high ground to the sewer in which the rest of you live, and have a night off. A couple of nights ago I watched a film. Naturally, I was able to turn it pretty quickly into hard work and handwringing.
Words are my power
You’ll recall how I’ve been writing for my uni’s studentmag. It’s some full on proper do-gooding, converting everyone on campus to my splendid way of life and raising issues usually neglected by right-on students such as Fairtrade, vegetarianism, feminism, environmentalism… Oh. Right.