Facts
Courtesy: peta.org.uk
Vivisection, the practice of experimenting on live animals, began because of religious prohibitions against the dissection of human corpses.(1) When religious leaders finally lifted these bans, there was a resurgence in human-based experiments, and knowledge advanced rapidly.(2) But in the mid-19th century, French physiologist Claude Bernard instigated a revival of animal experiments – a revival that has continued to this day.(3)
Animals in laboratories are shocked, infected, burned, poisoned, shot, surgically mutilated and subjected to many other types of torture in order to test all sorts of products, including hair dye, soap, nappies, agricultural and industrial chemicals and pharmaceutical drugs.(4,5,6,7) Animals are also used in military and psychological experiments, and dogs and cats are exploited in invasive experiments to test food for companion animals.(8,9,10) A large number of animals are even used in “basic research”, research for its own sake, where the aim and outcome are entirely unknown.
According to government statistics, 2.73 million animals, including birds, cats, dogs, horses, primates and rodents, were used in British laboratories in 2002.(11,12,13) Around 60 per cent of the animals in these experiments were given no anaesthetics at all, while the rest were administered “some form of anaesthesia to alleviate the severity of the interventions”.(14) Frequently, animals survive one experiment only to be used in subsequent procedures before they are killed.(15)
As shocking as these numbers are, they are not the end of the story. To maintain stocks of animals of a variety of weights and ages, researchers constantly over-breed. So in addition to the millions of animals who are killed in laboratory experiments, millions more die as a result of overpopulation. Records of the number of animals who are killed because of over-breeding are not kept, but the National Anti-Vivisection Society estimates that for every animal used in a UK lab, two are killed as “surplus” – sacks of rodents are gassed every day.(16,17)
Laboratories may breed animals for their own use or buy them from breeders.(18,19) Animals are also trapped in the wild and shipped to laboratories.(20) Breeding animals for laboratories is big business, but gaining access to those breeding establishments is virtually impossible. However, some animal rights campaigners were able to gain access to conduct unofficial inspections that revealed the following:
• The majority of animals in laboratories spend their lives in stacked cages not much larger than shoeboxes.(21)
• There is nothing to mentally stimulate the animals or relieve their boredom.(22)
• Many animals exhibit abnormal behaviours, including twisting, rocking, self-mutilation and wailing.(23)
• It is rare for laboratories to provide dogs with any bedding.(24)
• Some primates live alone in barren cages no more than a few meters across.(25)
• Rodents are often mutilated to make identification easy. Without anaesthetics, the tips of their tails or their toes are snipped off with scissors or holes are punched through their ears.(26)
It is generally accepted that the conditions inside laboratories do not promote animals’ well-being. In fact, cannibalism among some species is so common that guidelines are issued to prevent this “waste of resources”.(27)
The Law
The Home Office is responsible for regulating animal experiments through government legislation. The law that governs animal experiments in the UK is the 1986 Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act.(28) Despite purporting to have the toughest regulations in the world and regular government “inspections”, undercover investigations in the UK have revealed laboratory workers who punch dogs in the face, simulate sex acts with animals, administer incorrect doses of drugs and keep inaccurate records.(29) Despite “requiring” that alternatives to animal tests be used when available, fertility researcher Robert Winston states that some scientists “may well have turned a blind eye many times to alternatives”.(30) Because information about animal experiments is not in the public domain until after the experiments have taken place, it is impossible to put forward arguments that would prevent a particular experiment from taking place.
Within the system – which was designed with the best interests of vivisectors, rather than animals, in mind – project licences can be awarded within days, and undercover investigations have found that the Codes of Practice on Housing and Care of Laboratory Animals (COP) are not diligently enforced.(31) During an investigation of six randomly chosen laboratories, many breaches of the COP were discovered, including over-breeding, sloppy killing methods and inadequate training.(32,33)
Paying for Pain
Who pays for these experiments? We all do. The Ministry of Defence conducts animal experiments at its laboratories at Porton Down in Wiltshire. As it is a government department, taxpayers fund these experiments. Examples of torturous taxpayer-funded experiments include wound experiments in which monkeys are shot in the head; blast injury experiments in which pigs are strapped to a trolley and exposed to explosions less than a metre away; studies on the effects of chemical and biological agents in which primates and ferrets are poisoned with Staph Enterotoxin B, which causes “incapacitating vomiting”; and other deadly and painful procedures.(34,35,36)
Charities such as the British Heart Foundation and the Cancer Research Campaign raise funds through events and through their High Street shops in order to donate vast sums of money for research, including experiments on animals.(37,38,39,40) If you support these charities and do not specify how your money should be spent, you may be funding vivisection.
Private institutions and companies also invest in the vivisection industry. Many manufacturers of household products still pump products into animals’ stomachs and rub them into their eyes or onto their shaved, abraded skin.(41,42,43) Every time we buy a product from these companies, we are providing money that will be used to fund unnecessary tests on animals.
Bad Science
There are many reasons to oppose vivisection. Enormous physiological variations exist between rats, rabbits, dogs, pigs and human beings, which is why animal experiments are notoriously unreliable. They tell us about the effects that the product has on the animals used for the experiment, not about the product’s effects on people. Aspirin, for example, causes birth defects in dogs, monkeys, rats and cats but not people.(44) And Opren, an arthritis drug, killed 61 people after it was proved to be “safe” in experiments using monkeys and other animals.(45)
Dr Albert Sabin, who developed the polio vaccine, stated that his work to prevent the disease was delayed by an erroneous perception of the nature of the human variant that was based on misleading experimental models of polio in monkeys.(46)
In many cases, animal studies do not just hurt animals and waste money; they harm and kill people, too. The drugs Thalidomide, Clioquinol and Eraldin were all determined to be safe based on tests on animals, but they had devastating consequences for the humans who used them.(47) More recently, the anti-depressant drug Seroxat was in the news because of the unpredicted side effect of mood swings so serious that a previously stable man killed his family and then himself. Sixteen people taking the drug have reportedly committed suicide, but the drug was deemed safe based on tests on animals.(48)
Animal experiments are so flawed that between 30 and 50 per cent of drugs that are determined to be safe based on animal experiments are later found to cause serious side effects in people.(49) In fact, adverse reactions to drugs are the fourth-largest killer in the United States, and more than 100,000 people die every year from the side effects of prescription medications.(50,51) Even Allen Roses, a senior executive for GlaxoSmithKline, a company that conducts animal experiments, admitted that most prescription drugs do not work for most people.(52)
So why do researchers continue to conduct animal experiments? According to German researchers Drs H and M Stiller, “In praxis, all animal experiments are scientifically indefensible, as they lack any scientific validity and reliability in regard to humans. They only serve as an alibi for the drug manufacturers, who hope to protect themselves thereby”.(53)
Healing Without Hurting
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine reports that sophisticated non-animal research methods are more precise, cost effective and humane than traditional animal-based research methods.(54)
The UK’s Pharmagene Laboratories use only human tissues and sophisticated computer technologies to develop and test drugs. With tools from molecular biology, biochemistry and analytical pharmacology, Pharmagene conducts extensive studies of human genes and the effects of drugs on these genes and the proteins they make. While some companies have used animal tissues for this purpose, Pharmagene scientists believe that the discovery process is much more efficient with human tissues. “If you have information on human genes, what’s the point of going back to animals?” asks Pharmagene cofounder Gordon Baxter.(55)
Patients waiting for drugs and treatments could be spared years of suffering if companies and government agencies implemented efficient alternatives to animal studies. Lives, human and non-human alike, could be saved if the government fulfilled its stated goal of ending animal experimentation, but the paltry amount invested in non-animal testing methodologies – just a tiny percentage of the research budget – falls far short of this commitment.(56)
In addition, the three biggest killers in this country, heart disease, cancer and stroke, can be largely prevented with lifestyle changes, such as adopting a low-fat vegetarian diet, refraining from smoking and alcohol abuse and getting regular exercise.(57,58) These simple lifestyle changes can also help prevent arthritis, adult-onset diabetes, ulcers and a long list of other illnesses.(59,60,61,62) Yet prevention is not profitable and is drastically under-funded. For example, in 2002, the British Heart Foundation spent £45.8 million of their £67 million income on research but just £12.9 million on educational and care programmes.(63)
Who Benefits From Animal Research?
It is not surprising that those with a financial and intellectual stake in animal testing – those who make their money and reputations experimenting on animals or supplying vivisectors with cages, restraining devices, food for caged animals and killing machines for animals who are no longer considered useful – insist that nearly every medical advance has been made through the use of animals. This naïve and selective medical history discounts improvements in sanitation, which came from the development of the microscope and subsequent understanding of the role of micro-organisms. It also ignores the fact that animal experiments only make up one part of any testing regime – often the part that later proves misleading; that epidemiological studies, trials on human volunteers and in vitro studies have greatly contributed to our understanding of illnesses and how to protect against them; and that decades of enforced animal experimentation have stifled the medical community’s ability to explore non-animal testing methodologies, which are more relevant and beneficial to human patients.
Nobel Prize winner Sir Ernst Boris Chain, under oath at a hearing investigating the Thalidomide tragedy, said, “No animal experiment with a medicament, even if it is carried out on several animal species including primates under all conceivable conditions, can give any guarantee that the medicament tested in this way will behave in the same in humans; because in many respects the human is not the same as the animal”.(64)
Internationally renowned surgeon Dr Bruno Fedi stated, “The abolition of vivisection would in no way halt medical progress, just the opposite is the case. All the sound medical knowledge of today stems from observations carried out on human beings. No surgeon can gain the least knowledge from experiments on animals, and all the great surgeons of the past and of the present day are in agreement on that”.(65)
Changing the System
See Taking Action
References
1) C Ray Greek and Jean Swingle Greek, Sacred Cows and Golden Geese, The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000, p. 23.
2) Greek and Swingle Greek, pp. 25-6.
3) Greek and Swingle Greek, pp. 28-9.
4) Bristol-Myers Company, “The Policies of the Brands Found on Our Shelves”.
5) Colgate-Palmolive Ltd, “The Policies of the Brands Found on Our Shelves”.
6) Kimberly-Clark Ltd, “The Policies of the Brands Found on Our Shelves”.
7) The Boyd Group, “The Use of Animals in Testing Household Products: A Discussion Paper and Statement of Principle”, December 2002, p. 10.
8) Dr Lewis Moonie, Written answers to questions, House of Commons, 18 Mar 2002.
9) Robert Matthews, “Animal Testing Might Simply Be a Waste of Time”, The Sunday Telegraph, 29 Feb 2004.
10) Matthews.
11) Home Office, “Animals in Scientific Procedures”, Annual Statistics, 2003.
12) Home Office.
13) Letter from Beverley Hughes to The Independent, 5 Aug 2003.
14) Home Office.
15) Letter from Caroline Flint to the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, 30 Jul 2003.
16) Mike O’Brien, Speaking in the House of Commons, 4 Apr 2000.
17) National Anti-Vivisection Society, “Animal Experiments: The Shocking Truth”, 2003.
18) Martin Bright, “Inside the Labs Where Lives Hang Heavy in the Balance”, The Observer, 21 Jan 2001.
19) Gerald Howarth, Speaking in the House of Commons, 18 Jul 1997.
20) Angela Eagle, Speaking in the House of Commons, 20 Jul 2001.
21) National Anti-Vivisection Society, “Laboratory Animal Housing”, 2003.
22) Lord Lucas, Speaking in the House of Lords, 17 Oct 2003.
23) British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, “Undercover: Shamrock”.
24) British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, “Undercover: London Hospital”.
25) National Anti-Vivisection Society, “Laboratory Animal Housing”.
26) National Anti-Vivisection Society, “Laboratory Animal Housing”.
27) Stanford University, “Guidelines for Rodent Survival Surgery”, October 1998. 28) Research Defence Society, “1986 Animals Act”.
29) Small World Productions, It’s a Dog’s Life, March 1997.
30) David Adam, “The Hunt for Another Way”, The Guardian, 26 Feb 2004.
31) National Anti-Vivisection Society, “Freedom of Information and Animal Experiments”.
32) National Anti-Vivisection Society, “Summary of Findings”, Access Denied, March 1996.
33) National Anti-Vivisection Society, “Legal Critique”, Access Denied, March 1996.
34) Jojo Moyes, The Independent, 22 Nov 1997.
35) NPJ Cripps, GJ Cooper, “The Influence of Personal Blast Protection on the Distribution and Severity of Primary Blast Gut Injury”, The Journal of Trauma, 1996, pp. 5206-11.
36) Dr Lewis Moonie, Speaking in the House of Commons, 20 Dec 2000.
37) British Heart Foundation, “Annual Review 2002”, p. 10.
38) Cancer Research UK, “About Us”.
39) David Adam, “The Hunt for Another Way”, The Guardian, 26 Feb 2004.
40) Letter from Cancer Research to Mr Shah, 23 July 2003.
41) The Boyd Group, p. 12.
42) The Boyd Group, p. 12.
43) Moneim Fadali, Animal Experimentation: A Harvest of Shame, Hidden Springs Press, 1996, pp. 148-9.
44) Fadali, p. 45.
45) Greek and Swingle Greek, p. 68.
46) Fadali, p. 127.
47) Fadali, pp. 33-4.
48) Sarah Boseley, “GPs Accused of Not Reporting Seroxat Suicides”, The Guardian, 9 May 2003.
49) Matthews.
50) Greek and Swingle Greek, p. 60.
51) Sarah Boseley, “Side Effects of Drugs Kill Thousands”, The Guardian, 2 Jul 2004.
52) Steve Connor, “Data on Drugs’ Effectiveness ‘Hard to Find’”, The Independent, 9 Dec 2003.
53) Peter Tatchell, “Animal Research Is Bad Science”, 2001.
54) Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, “Animal Experimentation Issues”.
55) Reuters, “British Company Pioneers Non-Animal Tests”, 29 Aug 1996.
56) BBC, “What Are the Alternatives?” 17 Aug 2004.
57) British Heart Foundation, “Heart Health”.
58) World Cancer Research Fund, “Diet and Health Guidelines”.
59) P Beighton et al., “Rheumatoid Arthritis in a Rural South African Negro Population”, Annals of Rheumatic Disease, 34 (1975), p. 136.
60) DA Snowdon, RL Phillips, “Does a Vegetarian Diet Reduce the Occurrence of Diabetes?” American Journal of Public Health, 75 (1985), pp. 507-12.
61) BUPA, “Peptic Ulcer: Symptoms and Treatment of Stomach Ulcers”.
62) Laura Scott, “Safeguarding Children’s Health: Defeating Disease Through Vegetarian/Vegan Diets”, The Vegetarian and Vegan Foundation.
63) British Heart Foundation, “Annual Review 2002”.
64) Tony Page, Vivisection Unveiled, Jon Carpenter Publishing, 1997, p. 103.
65) Greek and Swingle Greek, p. 178.
