Over 400 years ago, William Harvey used animals to research how blood circulated in the body. In 1922, animal testing was put on the map when it was found that isolated doses of insulin in dogs could alleviate the symptoms of diabetes. According to PETA.org, each year over 100 million animals are killed in the U.S. alone for things such as animal testing in labs, or even in your average high school science class.

Now if we use those numbers to estimate the deaths of animals due to things like testing, the toll tops up at over a billion lives taken without one person being to blame.

In the U.S., over 50 percent of adults actually oppose the idea of animal testing. Even today there are only laws regulating animal testing, not abolishing it. This is purely due to the lack of actual influence PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has on the American populace.

Most people couldn’t even tell you what an acronym is nowadays, let alone know what PETA stands for, and to be honest, that’s basically a death sentence for the animals.

Animals are like children in a sense. They need to be spoken for because they cannot speak for themselves. Without the proper knowledge of what is really going on, no one listens. You have to know that animals are truly suffering at our expense.

Did you know that diseases that are artificially induced in animals in a laboratory, whether they are mice or monkeys, are never identical to those that occur naturally in human beings? And many of these animals are domesticated, born and bred for the sole purpose of being used as lab experiments. Now I’m definitely not saying we as humans don’t benefit greatly from animal testing. In actuality, it’s been huge in the make-up industry, which definitely warrants killing rats for your lipstick, right ladies?

Excuse the sarcasm, but this seems like a no-brainer. Killing is killing, and we talk about all the killing of innocent people everyday, but no one speaks up for the animals. I understand the laws of nature and evolution; I know that survival of the fittest reigns supreme and that we humans were at the bottom of the food chain a while back.

But how can we justify trapping poor animals for our own benefit when technology is so advanced now? We have phones that can tell us when somebody eats a milk shake on the moon, but we can’t figure out a more humane way to solve our problems. That’s just lazy, it’s ancient, and honestly, it’s just wrong. I don’t care if you’re killing a cat (an animal I hate with a passion) or Beyoncé. Both lives are equal because in the end, just like Beyoncé, that cat only gets one life, contrary to popular belief.