Our incredibly successful event hosted at Cameron Heights was some of our best work in the entire semester.
Our first stop in our mission to raise awareness for animal testing was Laurentian Senior Public School, our former middle school. For Future Forums our culminating activity was to pick a social justice issue and, well, do something about it. I partnered up with Hailey Schmidt, and we decided the social justice issue we would act upon would be animal testing in cosmetics. We wanted to raise awareness for this, so we decided to start a campaign.
Our campaign is called Animals Don't Wear Makeup. We thought that the fastest way to spread the word about this would be by getting people to post selfies of themselves with no makeup on with the hashtag #animalsdontwearmakeup. The reason I think this is an important issue is because people tend to look past it when it comes up. When we decided we would fight against animal testing, our teacher asked us the question that often comes up when debating this topic; "If we don't test on animals, what would we test on?" The thing is, you don't need to test on anything. People will often assume that cosmetics are tested on animals to ensure that the product is safe, however this isn't the case. Companies will test all of the possible defects on animals -burning of the skin, irritation, miscolouration- for liability purposes so that users can't sue them. They torture animals because they don't want to lose money/get a bad reputation. There are several companies that are cruelty free, some of which don't test on anything at all. Companies that still feel the need to test have found these small devices known as in vitro screens that replicate the reactions of human skin. This will provide a safe, harmless way to test products, as well as a more accurate result, seeing as during research Hailey and I discovered are about as genetically similar to rabbits (the animal that is most used in cosmetics testing) as we are to a banana. What we want to do to help raise awareness is to go to schools around the area and educate the students about animal testing and why we feel that it's wrong. We would then ask them to show their support by posting a selfie on either Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook with the hashtag #animalsdontwearmakeup. So far, we've gone to Laurentian Senior Public school and we have permission to present at our own school, Cameron Heights. Hopefully we will get a response from Mr. Doadt, the principal of Huron Heights, giving us permission to present there as well. We are very excited about this project. We're having a tremendous amount of fun and we really feel like we're doing something. Post a selfie with the hashtag to show your support and help us out with the campaign. Thanks :) Kat.N |
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