When I looked up images of animal testing, a lot of the images that came up were from Lush’s Fighting Animal Testing campaign. Lush is a organic beauty product store that thrives on “buying ingredients only from companies that do not conduct or commission tests on animals and in testing our products on humans”. Since I am somewhat familiar with the store I decided to look into there campaign. Mainly because these images were somewhat extreme. A example of what I mean by extreme is images of humans being tested like animals and having things constrain them and injected in them.
In 2012 Lush decided to use a very extreme protest technique in order to get peoples attention to the severity of the situation, and they hoped to challenge public apathy about animal testing. In April of 2012, Lush had a 10 hour extreme endurance performance that had a 24 year old woman represent an animal test subject for the cosmetics industry. The performance artist, Jacqueline, endured a series of animal tests that included forced-feeding, eye irritancy tests, and two (saline) injections. This was however a performance, and she was allowed to speak or leave whenever she felt it was to much and no “actual” pain was felt by her. The purpose of the protest was to spark public debate, and it certainly did as people watched in shock and horror of the performance. After seeing these images and videos of the protest, I feel like it was really extreme and I’m not sure if they needed to take it that far because people do know it’s wrong. On the other hand I feel like if this protest group went to such extreme lengths to prove their point, which is that it’s taking to long to fix this injustice, then I guess it was what had to be done. I have to say that it definitely made a effect on my view of animal testing, which is that it needs to be stopped.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/27/lush-animal-cruelty-performance-art
http://www.fightinganimaltesting.com