Why Animal Experiments are Wrong

Introduction

• Every year millions of animals are forced to suffer in "scientific experiments"
• In 2000 2.5 million live animal experiments were authorised in Great Britain.
• Are these really necessary?
• We shall look at testing on new products and testing drugs to find a cure.

1. To check new products to make sure they are safe
2. To assist in finding a cure for disease

Animals and Safety Tests

• In 2001 443,000 animals were used in British laboratories of 'safety' tests.
• The tests are supposed to assess the safety of new products.
• Various doses are tried out, in order to find the highest level that can be used without poisoning the animals.
• Animals suffer from vomiting, haemorrhage, tremor, weight loss, liver damage and tumours.

The Tests are Scientifically Worthless

• Apart from the suffering involved, these tests are scientifically worthless.
• A former Director of (then) Huntingdon Research Centre pointed out that animal studies predict drug side-effects for people only 5-25% of the time!
• This means we would get better predictions by tossing a coin!
• The French scientific organisation, Pro Anima, estimates that one million EU citizens die prematurely every year because of toxins in their food or environment, which have been passed as safe by animal tests .

The consequences are obvious. Hazardous chemicals are being passed as 'safe' on the basis of tests on animals, thereby giving consumers a false sense of security and causing them to be exposed to dangerous substances without due protection. Two glaring examples of this are cigarette smoke and cholesterol - neither of which is bad for people, according to animal tests! In fact, French scientific organisation, Pro Anima, estimates that one million EU citizens die prematurely every year because of toxins in their food or environment, which have been passed as safe by animal tests .

Alternatives to Animal Testing

• Non-animal testing methods using cell, tissue and organ cultures
• Also powerful computer modelling programmes capable of simulating the human metabolism
• It is up to the authorities to accept non-animal methods as valid, so that inferior (and never validated!) animal tests will no longer be accepted.
• Animal Testing is a system responsible for many deaths and should be outlawed.

Animals and cures for disease

• Animals do not typically suffer from the same illnesses as humans
• Scientists try to recreate symptoms of human disease in animals
• Animals are physically or chemically damaged to produce some of the symptoms of the disease
• They are also bred with a specific genetic defect, which causes them to display one or more characteristics of the disease

Animals are either physically or chemically damaged to produce some of the symptoms of the disease or, increasingly, they are bred with a specific genetic defect, which causes them to display one or more characteristics of the disease. Usually this involves 'knocking out' a gene, or inserting one from a human or another animal.

Heart disease

• The most common cause of heart disease in people is cholesterol on the artery walls
• Dogs are often used to research heart disease
• To imitate this condition artificially, the dog's coronary arteries are tied around with wire or blocked by plastic plugs

Dogs are often the model of choice for research into heart disease although 'it is virtually impossible to produce atherosclerosis in a dog' even when vast amounts of cholesterol and saturated fat are added to their diet .To imitate this condition artificially, the coronary arteries are tied around with wire or blocked by plastic plugs. The most obvious cure for the condition in humans is to lower cholesterol levels but this would clearly have no effect in such a model, which is therefore of no real relevance.

Stroke

• In humans, strokes are 'brain attacks', much like heart attacks, where blood vessels in the brain become blocked by a clot.
• The cause is usually high blood pressure.
• Naturally-occurring strokes are extremely rare in animals.
• Artificial strokes are induced in cats by blocking arteries in their brains.

Artificial strokes are induced in cats by blocking arteries in their brains , which clearly gives no useful insight into the cause of a stroke.

Cancer

• There are more than 200 different cancers in humans
• Scientists give cancer to animals with carcinogenic chemicals, radiation or injecting them with tumour cells.
• These experiments have not helped find a cure for cancer in humans because animal responses are different to humans. For example it took 50 years to induce lung cancer in laboratory animals forced to breathe tobacco smoke.
• This delayed the health warning to humans and resulted in millions of unnecessary deaths.

But, even in supposedly equivalent cancers, there are major differences between species that invalidate the models. In fact, it is true to say that the lack of success in finding treatments for cancer in humans is because the research effort has been concentrated in animals. Thomas E. Wagner, senior scientist at Ohio University's Edison Biotechnology Institute, remarked: 'God knows we've cured mice of all sorts of tumours. But that isn't medical research.' And according to Dr Albert Sabin, developer of the polio vaccine, 'Giving cancer to laboratory animals has not and will not help us to understand the disease or to treat those persons suffering from it... Laboratory cancers have nothing in common with natural human cancers' .

When it comes to curing these experimental tumours, the animal models turn out to be of little value. For every 30-40 drugs effective in treating mice with cancer, only one is effective in people . This problem is inherent in all research using animals because 'for the great majority of disease entities, the animal models either do not exist or are really very poor' .

Animal responses to carcinogens are so different from ours that it took 50 years to induce lung cancer in laboratory animals forced to breathe tobacco smoke , thus delaying the health warning to humans and resulting in millions more unnecessary deaths. The following words from Dr Irwin Bross, former director of the largest cancer research institute in the world - the Sloan-Kettering, say it all: 'While conflicting animal results have often delayed and hampered advances in the war on cancer, they have never produced a single substantial advance either in the prevention or treatment of human cancer.'

Experiments on Cats and Dogs

• Every year 10,000 experiments 'likely to cause... pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm' are carried out on cats and dogs.
• They are surgically mutilated, infected with dangerous viruses and made to endure convulsions, vomiting and other symptoms.
• Laboratory cats and dogs usually live in barren pens and cages - deprived of affectionate human contact.

The scientists' own published papers reveal that these animals suffer damage to vital body systems, such as the heart, lung, brain and liver. They are surgically mutilated, infected with dangerous viruses and made to endure convulsions, vomiting and other symptoms. Cats and dogs are used in the following ways:

• to investigate human afflictions, such as migraine, heart disease and stroke
• to see how the body works
• for the testing of drugs, agricultural chemicals, industrial substances, food additives, household products, and even war and riot control weapons.

Around half the experiments on cats involve the use of anaesthetics at some stage. Included among the experiments in which no anaesthetic is used are those where animals are deliberately infected with feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV), the cat equivalent of the human AIDS virus.

Dogs are most commonly employed for toxicity tests which rarely use any form of pain relief, even though the poisoning tests can last for weeks or months.

It is not only during the experiment that animals may suffer. In March 1997, the Channel 4 television documentary Countryside Undercover revealed how two technicians at Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) had punched and violently shaken beagle dogs used for experiment.

Laboratory cats and dogs usually live in barren pens and cages - deprived of affectionate human contact.

Experiments on Horses

• Welsh mountain ponies are the most popular breed for scientists to experiment on.
• They are deliberately infected with herpes and influenza, monitored and then killed.
• The experiments result in abortions, paralysis and other severe symptoms.
• These experiments are often funded by horse racing companies.

Scientists at Cambridge University have even developed a 'specific pathogen free' foal, whom they regarded as especially suitable for infection research. The Animal Health Trust's (AHT) have experimented on horses with equine herpes and influenza, in which Welsh mountain ponies were deliberately infected, monitored and then killed. The herpes experiments resulted in abortions, paralysis and other severe symptoms. Equine influenza symptoms included nasal discharge, difficulty in breathing, fever and coughing. There are close ties between the Trust and the racing world, not least the appointment as honorary vice president of Sheikh Mohammed, the world's leading race horse owner. Funding for the various experiments came from, among others, the Horserace Betting Levy Board and the Thoroughbred Breeders' Association.

Meanwhile, the AHT's infection research continues, much of it carried out on pregnant Welsh mountain ponies. Previous Animal Aid investigations have catalogued the suffering resulting from such work - designed to produce effective vaccines for diseases such as equine herpes virus (EHV) and influenza. The EHV experiments, often financed wholly or partly by horse racing interests, have led to animals aborting their foals and developing severe neurological symptoms leading to paralysis.

The scale of the AHT's herpes research has now become clear with the publication of a scientific paper describing an eight-year programme of experiments, some of them involving more than 20 animals at a time. The objective was to develop a 'reliable model' for the abortions produced by EHV-1 in pregnant animals, all previous attempts having resulting in 'inconsistent or contradictory' results. A trustworthy method was needed, said the authors, to test whether vaccines work.

Scientists at the Trust inoculated pony mares with different strains of the virus to see which produced most abortions. Use of the Ab4/8 strain proved the most promising, leading to 'high rates of abortion and occasional neurological disease'. Several of the mares developed paralysis in all four limbs. Other symptoms in adult animals included fever and unsteady gait. That paper was published in 1995. A 1996 report describes how four Welsh mountain ponies were dosed with the virus while three months pregnant, and another when she had been carrying for five months.

The influenza research also continues - Animal Aid having obtained undercover video film of a dozen ponies who, during the summer of 1996, had been subjected to vaccine trials. To test whether vaccines work, healthy animals are deliberately infected with the disease. Previously published papers have described the resulting breathing difficulties, fever, coughing and nasal discharge.

Conclusion

• British law requires that any new drug must be tested on at least two different species of live mammal.
• One must be a large non-rodent such as a cat or dog.
• As we have seen, the experiments on these animals is unnecessary and cruel and should stop now.

Pictures

Rabbit that has been used in a skin irritancy test

Experiment exposing monkeys to long-term trace amounts of methylmercury

Experiment on a cat

Chimpanzee infected with syphilis

Web Links

Animal Aid

Animal Experimentation: A Failed Technology

MORI Polls Animals In Medicine And Science

European Coalition To End Animal Experiments

World Animal Net Cosmetics Campaign

BBC Hot Topics - Animal Experiments

BBC Horizon Script - Chimps on Death Row

BBC News - Head to Head: Animal Testing

Australian Animal Liberation Web Site

Some 'thoroughly tested' drugs that injured and killed.

Essene Christianity