English / Animal Testing
What do the highlighted words make you think of? What kind of words are they?
Pick out at least 3 examples of emotive language. How do these words make you feel about the topic?
Every year thousands of cats and dogs suffer and die in British laboratories. The types of experiment performed on these innocent animals include the force feeding of pesticides, herbicides, exposure to radiation, the infliction of physical trauma, interference with the central nervous system, application of substances to the eye, burning and scalding.
Of the 3 million experiments carried out in Britain each year, approximately two thirds are performed while the animals are under no anaesthetic for any part of the experiment. There can be no doubt that pain and suffering are inflicted on weak and defenseless animals in British laboratories as the following examples will illustrate:
Pesticides – insect repellent/insect killer
Herbicides – weed killer
To inflict – to cause,
To scald – to scorch, to burn
Anaesthetic – drugs which cause you to lack awareness and/or sensitivity and feeling
How trustworthy do you think this example is? Why?
…An unknown number of cats, under anaesthesia, had a tube inserted into one of their back legs and another into one of their two brain chambers. The cats were then allowed to recover consciousness and the tubes remained in place. Two or three days later, morphine or naloxone was given via the tubes resulting in vigorous and widespread shivering; periods of loud meowing; vomiting, urinating and defecation.
(Journal of Physiology.)
Consciousness – awareness
Urinating – passing water from the body
Defecation – passing solids from the body
Why do you think the writer included the last sentence, highlighted?
…Cats and rabbits were used to study the rise in blood sugar levels caused by heating. The animals were tightly tied down on a surgical table by rope attached to their legs to prevent them from moving. An angle poise lamp was brought down to within 1cm of the shaved abdomen and kept there for 20-30 minutes. During this time, it was noted that the skin temperature reached 131.5’C. (Boiling point is 100’C) The researches referred to the animal as being “cooked”. The rabbits in particular were not anaesthetized properly. Similar experiments had already been carried out some fifteen years earlier and the results already known.
(Special Investigation Report.)
angle poise lamp – a spring loaded lamp that can be moved and twisted into a large range of positions
Why do we need to test cosmetics?