ANIMAL TESTING: cold hard facts

General Vivisection Sound Bites

Every year, millions of taxpayer dollars are spent torturing, mutilating, isolating, and addicting millions of animals in the name of science.

The animal-research industry is a violent, bloody industry. It’s as indefensible as the drug trade. In the 21st century with modern technology, there is no reason to continue torturing and abusing animals for research.

Animals used for research live in small cages or crowded conditions never knowing what a normal life might be like. They live in constant fear and suffer through painful experiments without anesthetics.

Taking a healthy being from a completely different species, artificially inducing a condition, keeping him or her in an unnatural and stressed condition, and then trying to apply the “results” to naturally occurring diseases in human beings is risky at best.  left < Texas Tech experiment that feeds chemicals into their brains.

Internal interactions vary enormously from species to species: Penicillin kills guinea pigs; aspirin kills cats and causes birth defects in almost all other laboratory animals; morphine, a depressant to humans, stimulates goats, cats, and horses; and animal tests did not predict the tragic birth defects caused by Thalidomide. 

Tests on animals also can’t measure headaches, nausea, tinnitus (ringing in the ears), dizziness, blurred vision, amnesia, or depression―all potentially dangerous to humans.

There are many alternatives to animal research. They include computer and mathematical models, human tissue and cell cultures, clinical and epidemiological studies, and, most importantly, prevention. The three biggest killers―heart disease, cancer, and strokes―are all preventable. 
  
Almost everything we know about lung cancer, we learned from clinical and epidemiological studies―by looking at those who already have the disease and populations of people who smoke. We have therefore determined that smoking causes cancer. We do not need to continue forcing dogs to inhale smoke as the tobacco industry does, trying to prove that smoking does not cause cancer.

Here is the bottom line: Not only is animal research preventing us from gaining more relevant information, it also continues to kill animals and people every year.

Undercover investigations inside laboratories have documented lack of veterinary care for sick and injured animals and insufficient pain relief before, during, and after highly invasive procedures. Sometimes animals die from sheer neglect - failure to notice that watering sippers have stopped functioning or failure to notice that an animal has been sick. right > Beagles awakening after surgery to cut away chunks of their thighs for experiments.

ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION: MISLEADING AND DANGEROUS

Using animals as “models” of human disease can be dangerous, misleading, or both.

The Food & Drug Administration recently reported that of all drugs that test safe and effective in animal tests, 92 percent are found to be either unsafe or ineffective in humans.

Dr. Richard Klausner, former director of the National Cancer Institute, stated: “The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades, and it simply didn’t work in humans.”

ALTERNATIVES TO USING ANIMALS

The trend in science is away from outdated animal tests. Non-animal testing methods are faster, cheaper, and more accurate than animal tests and many corporations and government agencies are adopting these tests.

The National Cancer Institute now uses human cancer cells, taken by biopsy during surgery, to perform first-stage testing for its new anti-cancer drugs, sparing the million mice it used to use every year and giving us a much better shot at combating cancer.

TOPKAT is a software package that allows researchers to predict the oral toxicity and the degree of skin and eye irritation of chemicals.

The Hurel microchip or “human-on-a-chip,” developed by researchers at Cornell University, uses clumps of cells from different human organs linked by fluid-filled channels to mimic the body's physiology on a miniature scale, including how each organ reacts to drugs and other chemicals.

TRANSGENIC ANIMALS

Animals can never be ‘humanized’ -- no matter how much genetic manipulation and wishful thinking is inflicted on them a mouse cannot be turned into a tiny human being.  There will always be thousands of important differences.

Genetic engineering is responsible for a skyrocketing in increase in the numbers of animals being used in laboratory experiments. In developing a particular transgenic line, 90-99% of the animals bred are killed immediately because they don’t incorporate the gene wanted. Those who survive suffer from severe birth defects, degenerative joint disease, heart problems, liver and kidney diseases, pneumonia, and cancer.

Because of the different mechanisms of action, genetic engineering is not predictive to humans and the disease models created in animals don't mimic human disease.

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> PETA.org

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