DID YOU KNOW?
To measure severe burns on live tissue, a pet is burned alive with a flame-thrower until the charred flesh can be removed in large pieces from while the animal is still alive. An experiment to study head trauma requires a pet’s head to be strapped down and receive high impact blows to the head resulting in severe brain damage. To demonstrate there is no difference in eye protein levels of the site deprived, pet’s eyelids are sewn shut then later compared to normal protein levels. To study recovery from injury, a pet is strapped down, and the pet’s knees are cut to leave large flaps.
Animal testing costs the American public over $136 billion annually. Animal testing is costing your family more then $300 dollars a year. Alternatives cost a significantly less amount and produce far better results.
Humans and animals are different in many ways. Many drugs approved for human use based on animal studies have had to be taken off the market at a later date because of side effects not revealed in animal studies.
More than 100,000 people have been hospitalized and later died from toxic reactions to medications in 1994 that were not predicted by animal tests.
Here are some other examples of animal testing in failure:
-Many patients who were administered the general anesthetic Methoxyflurane lost function of their kidneys because animal experiments failed to reveal possible kidney toxicity.
-The arthritis medication Flosint proved fatal to humans after passing tests on rats, monkeys, and dogs.
-Opren, a cough medication tested successfully on monkeys and other animals, killed 61 people and caused severe reactions in thousands of others.
-Antidepressant Zelmid tested on rats and dogs with no problems, caused severe neurological problems in humans.
-After being tested on numerous animals, Practolol caused blindness in 78 people and killed 23 others.
There are numerous other examples. Drugs that pass animal tests end up harming or killing humans about 61% of the time. Promising treatments are withheld from humans when they don't pass animal tests. Scientists point to huge chances of possible vaccines for cancer, heart disease, and HIV being withheld from the public because of faulty animal tests. And not all of the animals killed in laboratories are researching drugs and cures, millions of rabbits die after being tortured by cosmetic companies. Cosmetic companies perform more then half of all animal tests.
Animal testing is a flawed and generally misleading method of scientific investigation that wastes time, money and resources.
Animals and humans are very different physiologically, metabolically, anatomically, genetically and psychologically. There are many ways in which humans and animal are different. Rodents deposit plaque (fatty acids) in the liver, while humans deposit plaque in the blood vessels. Unlike humans, rats have no gall bladder. Cats lack an enzyme that makes it impossible for them to metabolize ibuprofen. The circulation system of dogs is different because they walk on four legs, while humans walk on two. The list goes on and on. Not only that, animals can not be used to test for other animals.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University tested similarities between rats and mice, and found that only 30% of the time, a drug that cures a disease in rats cures the same disease in mice.
Animal testing is only good for the animal that is being tested on. The only true scientific model for a rat is another rat. Likewise, the only true scientific model for a human is another human.
The General Accounting Office reviewed the drugs marketed between 1976 and 1985. Of these, 52% were found to be more dangerous than pre-market animal studies had indicated, with adverse side effects including permanent disability and death.
Less then half of drugs and cosmetics on the market show the same result in humans as in animals. Instead of animal testing, you would be better off tossing a coin!
Most of the people that promote animal testing also point to the polio vaccine, but the truth is far more complicated.
The most important advance in the development of a polio vaccine came in 1949 when Enders, Weller, and Robbins showed that the polio virus could be grown in human tissue. They were awarded the Nobel prize for this discovery.
Despite this breakthrough, Salk and Sabin - who are usually credited with the polio vaccines - continued their reliance on traditional animal models and the use of monkey tissues. They feared that human tissues would harbor dangerous human viruses. We now know that monkey cells harbor dozens of viruses, some of which have been shown to infect humans, and are probably at least as dangerous as human tissue, if not more so.
Sabin himself made an impressive argument against animal testing when he testified to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs in 1984 saying, "...work on prevention [of polio] was delayed by an erroneous conception of the nature of the human disease, based on misleading experimental models [of polio] in monkeys."Just because some scientists used monkeys doesn't mean they had to or that monkeys were a good choice.
Animal testing produces inaccurate and dangerous results and wastes enormous amounts of precious time and resources, while promising-new-techniques are ignored. Consider the enormous wastefulness of maternal deprivation studies, in which monkeys are taken from their mothers and systematically abused. The conclusion from these studies, that abuse and neglect lead to psychological damage and social maladjustment. It certainly doesn't justify the suffering of countless animals or the millions of dollars, which have been spent to come to this foregone conclusion. Meanwhile, programs to help abused and neglected children are deprived of the funding which could make a very significant impact on these children's lives.
Since 1901, 2/3 of all Noble Prizes in medicine have been awarded to scientists that used alternative technologies, not animal experiments in there research. Results derived from animal experiments have had a very minimal effect on the dramatic rise in life expectancy in the 20th century. Between 25 and 50 billion animals are meaninglessly killed in laboratories each year.