The Silence of the Bunnies

At thirteen, kept awake at night by the plight of lab animals, I wrote a heartfelt letter to Procter & Gamble, urging them to cease animal testing. I took the letter into my father's office. He was working as an engineer for the Auckland City Council. I would often sneak away from after school care to visit his office with my brother (we played a very 90's snake game on Dad's work PC) and sometimes my best friend, Cara (she and I once took turns wheeling each other between the cubicles in the big green paper recycling bin while all the engineers were upstairs enjoying Friday Night Drinks on the AstroTurfed rooftop.) After greeting the friendly and familiar engineers on my dad's floor, I took my petition into the tea room and put it on the windowsill next to the fundraising chocolates and the boxes full of tea bags and sugar and wooden stirrers. Over the next few days I got a few signatures, albeit not as many as I'd anticipated. I sent off my letter and felt righteous and never heard from P&G, and eventually moved on to the next phase (poetry? the paranormal?).

This evening an email arrived in my inbox from Animals Australia, containing a photo of pilloried white bunnies in a lab, rows and rows of their pointy white ears, all of them waiting to have chemicals dripped into their eyes. Australia has laws against testing products on animals (the email informed me), but no laws against selling products that have been tested on animals in other countries. It was all too easy to fill in my name and email address on the form provided, and send off a generic email expressing my concern to Nicola Roxon MP, Federal Member for Gellibrand and Minister for Health and Ageing, from whom I promptly received an out-of-office autoreply. 

Living ethically is one of the few things that has gotten easier since I was thirteen. Thank you, internet, for facilitating such feats as this paperless contact with a politician, and also this here, a list of companies that don't test their products on animals, accessible from the aisles of supermarkets by smarter phones than mine.