Vegan Fashion week is now in its fifth year since 2019. This year’s event took place from October 8th through October 10th in LA. Vegan Fashion Week not only aims to highlight the creations of fashion designers who are showing that it is possible to design cruelty-free Vegan fashion, it’s also aimed at providing support for the transition towards more environmentally sustainable practices. For example, the Vegan Fashion Week nonprofit worked closely with designer Willa Phoenix to produce the first Pineapple leather shoes to walk the red carpet at the Oscars. 

Vegan fashion is important because it challenges what’s possible for product development and materials used in manufacturing and production. Existing supply chains support cruelty-based materials like leather, which grow out of the animal exploitation industry and harm the environment. For example leather is produced through animal slaughter and it also creates extremely toxic byproducts through the process of tanning leather, which can affect water supply and human health. 

The Vegan Fashion Week runway show featured clothes made from apple fiber, bamboo and linen. Celebrities like Tara Reid and Maggie Baird, Billie Eilish’s mother, attended the show. Vegan clothing is a fast growing industry, and the more you know, the more you can support brands that use cruelty-free materials. Showcasing innovation through events like vegan fashion week can help to normalize vegan fashion and spread awareness to the public. 

For more information on Vegan brands and materials, please visit the links below:

https://www.projectcece.com/blog/594/best-vegan-clothing-brands/https://www.peta.org/living/personal-care-fashion/vegan-eco-clothing-belongs-in-your-closet/https://theecohub.com/vegan-fabrics/

The FDA is finally catching up with animal rights advocates. A new law signed by President Biden at the end of December reflects the reality that testing on animals is cruel, and – ironically – unscientific. The FDA Modernization Act 2.0 ends the requirement that drugs in development must undergo testing in animals before being given to participants in human trials. 

Animal Testing is Unreliable

Animal testing has been found to be an unreliable predictor of toxicity in a large range of drugs. The FDA Modernization Act makes way for new methods of animal testing such as testing cells grown on chips, or organoids, organized cell tissue mimicking human organs. Data modeling has also been shown to help predict human reactions to drugs. Animal testing is a slow and tortuous process. The lab animal trade imports animals like monkeys into the US to be caged and tested by being implanted with diseases like cancer. The suffering the animals endure is intense and unconscionable. In our recent blog, we discussed how Elon Musk’s Neuralink has been using rhesus macaques in botched experiments that have caused painful injury and death. The “forward thinking” company has been needlessly killing animals and operating under a “move fast and break things” policy which has resulted in animal suffering more than it has produced results. 

Animal Suffering is Not Yet Over

The FDA Modernization Act does not yet make animal testing illegal. There is a long way to go before the suffering of lab animals is over. It’s estimated that around 50 million animals are used in lab experiments in the US each year. A large majority of the animals are highly intelligent and social animals who can understand what’s happening to them and witness the suffering of their peers. 

What You Can Do 

The FDA’s New Law makes it more likely that states will move to ban animal testing on cosmetics and more, as New York just did. It’s important to maintain pressure on local representatives to change the law. You can also help by boycotting all companies that test their products on animals. Apps such as “cruelty cutter” and “Bunny” can help you to vet the products you are buying to check if they are cruelty free. 

Last year when the world was struggling to find a solution to the global COVID-19 pandemic, researchers who were testing on animals moved quickly to human trials and conducted some of the fastest ever research using human trials. The vaccines were ready for rollout 6 months later.

This is not a normal timeline. Usually, animals are tested on and suffer for years in clinical trials before drugs and treatments are deemed safe to test on humans. Yet in 2020, somehow it was possible to speed up development and cut out years of animal suffering.

Also in 2020, animal testing dragged on even though the vaccines were showing promising results in humans. There was a “monkey shortage,” as labs rushed to perform unnecessary tests on rhesus macaques who were imported over great distances to suffer in labs and then be euthanized.

Over 100 million animals die during animal tests every year according to PETA. One reason so many animals are killed in the US is that animal testing is simply a bureaucratic requirement to receive drug approval, according to this blog.

And of course, animal testing is also big business. The demand for animals in research is subject to predictions and betting about how much money it’s worth, just like any other market. The so-called “monkey shortage” is yet another way humans reveal the value they place on animal life. Animals are a commodity to serve humans, not living beings.

PETA has an informative list of reasons why animal tests are unnecessary and cruel. One of the reasons is the abject failure of many treatments and drugs tested on animals when they are tested on humans. It is an inexact science to compare human and animal biological systems, and some of these tests even harm humans. The thinking seems to be to just throw any research at the problem and see if it sticks. The excuse for being able to do things this way is the underlying belief that animals are disposable.

Please check out this PETA list of reasons why animal testing isn’t necessary and why other testing methods are becoming the norm: https://headlines.peta.org/end-experiments-on-animals-for-covid-19/

Read More:

https://www.bignewsnetwork.com/news/268699398/animal-model-market-driven-by-developments-in-pharmaceutical-and-crispr-genetic-research-opines-factmr

https://insidesources.com/there-is-no-monkey-shortage-for-covid-19-research-because-no-monkeys-are-needed/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/09/10/covid-vaccine-treatment-trials-create-monkey-shortage-science/5714115002/