Since most advances in medicine and veterinary health involve some animal research, it is virtually impossible to access medical or veterinary care and avoid using any products that have been developed using animals. But much of the safety testing that involves animals is for non-medical products. There are choices that companies can make which will reduce or eliminate the need for animal testing. Only new ingredients in products require testing. If companies stick to old formulations, or to combinations of chemicals that have previously been safety tested, then no further testing is required. Unfortunately consumers tend to encourage the development and marketing of new products, which in turn results in more animal testing.
Those companies which advertise that they do not carry out animal testing will generally have a policy that they only use ingredients that have already been tested (by other companies). Some of these companies will have a 'fixed cut-off date', say 1990, and they will only use ingredients that were tested before this date. Others will have a 'rolling date' where they will only use ingredients that have not been tested in the past 5 or 10 years. Other companies may state that they do not test their 'products' on animals, but in many cases they test the ingredients, or they pay an external company to do the testing for them.
There is no simple solution to avoiding animal testing. There are things that you can do to help reduce the amount of testing carried out, such as avoiding buying 'new improved' formulations and checking labels to see if a company makes claims about animal testing and asking what these claims mean.
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