ANIMALS KILLED FOR SCIENCE/EDUCATION

The big business of vivisection wants you to believe that science must use animals in experimentation for human safety and to advance medical health. Here are the facts:

• Vivisectors (animal experimenters) attempt to recreate the symptoms of human diseases or injuries in healthy animals through deliberate, artificial and often violent methods. Similar symptoms may be created in the animal, but these similarities bear little resemblance to actual diseases in human beings, which usually arise as the result of a complex pattern of factors, which cannot be replicated in the laboratory. Western (allopathic) medicine, based on vivisection, focuses almost exclusively on suppressing or disguising symptoms, rather than treating the original cause of the disease.
• We now know that more than 90 percent of human diseases are caused by environmental impacts or lifestyle choices. The need for cures is largely a myth created to sustain a multi-billion dollar medical structure.
• Animals are very different from each other and different from humans. Even species that seem similar, such as rats and mice, react differently to different drugs. This is known as species specificity. Researchers themselves acknowledge that, because of species specificity, information obtained from animal experimentation is not reliably applicable to humans; extrapolations are inevitably inaccurate. Sometimes the information used from animal experiments is so inaccurate that it results in harm to humans, as when a drug must be recalled because of unexpected side effects. If animal testing was accurate, this would never occur.
• Vivisection is actually a huge business, with billions of dollars involved in breeding, grants, fundraising and salaries. Those enmeshed in this industry will do everything they can to perpetuate their profits, including misleading the public about the efficacy of animal experimentation.
• There are effective replacement techniques available to use in place of animal tests such as computer models, in vitro testing, and the like.
• Animal experimenters would have you believe that animal suffering is minimal in laboratories. In fact, the cruelty perpetrated by vivisectors every day, every minute, is so overwhelming it is at first difficult to grasp. The photographs in this website clearly show the shocking animal suffering that takes place every minute of every day in laboratories across the nation. Vivisectors care little for the animals they use. For these people, divorced from their natural human sympathies for suffering, animals are not living, feeling beings but only a means to an end.
• Three animals die in labs every second of every day in the United States alone. In the time it takes to read this brochure, another 3,600 animals will be killed in laboratories and classrooms.
• Dogs, cats (some former companion animals), monkeys, mice, horses, pigs and many, many other species are scalded, poisoned, sliced, drugged, terrorized, mutilated, electrocuted, buried alive, drowned, starved, and irradiated. After they are sacrificed (vivisectors' term for killing ), they are thrown away and more animals obtained for new experiments.
• Animals are force-fed huge quantities of toxic substances such as bleach, nail polish, shampoo, and insecticides until they burst, bleed to death or die of convulsions. Their fur is shaved and caustic substances poured onto bare skin to measure the degree of blistering. Doctors agree that these worthless tests do nothing to guarantee safety for people, but are performed only to protect companies against possible litigation.