Cindy-Lou Dale

IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE

 

We’ve all succumbed to the smile of the little old dear standing outside a supermarket rattling a donation tin for one or other cancer charity; and most of us have also donated goods to our local charity shop or responded to a fundraising appeal put through the letterbox. But how many of us know what is truly being done with this money?

 

The Brits are know the world over as a animal loving nation, a people that would be horrified to learn that millions of animals are killed in experiments funded by the British health charities we so innocently donate to – charities such as the British Heart Foundation, the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) and the Cancer Research Campaign (CRC) -- all of whom advocate animal-based research.

 

Other charities that test on animals:

Action Research
Alzheimer’s Disease Society

Arthritis & Rheumatism Council
Association for International Cancer Research
Brain Research Trust
Breakthrough Breast Cancer
British Diabetic Association
British Lung Foundation
Cancer Immunotherapy Trust
Children’s Nationwide Medical Research Fund,
Cystic Fibrosis Research Trust
DEBRA
Digestive Disorders Foundation
Epilepsy Research Foundation
Hearing Research Trust
Institute of Cancer Research
International Spinal Research Trust
Iris Fund for the Prevention of Blindness
Lepra
Leukemia Research Fund
Marie Curie Cancer Care
M E Association
Migraine Trust
Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain
Muscular Dystrophy Group of Great Britain
National Association for Colitis and Crohn's Disease
National Asthma Campaign
National Heart Research Fund
National Kidney Research Fund
National Meningitis Trust
Parkinson’s Disease Society of the UK
Primary Immunodeficiency Association
Research into Aging
Scope (formerly The Spastics Society)
Tenovus
Wellcome Trust
World Cancer Research Fund

 

When animal experimentation is discussed, how often have you heard "if you had to choose between the life of your child and the life of a cag, which would you chose?"

 

Of course that statement is an intentional distortion of what vivisection is truly about as it has nothing to do with choosing between the life of a child or the life an animal but more about intentionally causing misery and eventual death to millions of defenseless animals, with nothing other than a slight possibility that such enormous combined suffering may in some way lead to further insight of a illness. Bear in mind these scientific tests are carried out on creatures with nonhuman anatomy, nonhuman physiology, and nonhuman pathology and therefore are very clearly unsuitable test subjects to explore human disease. Physicians and scientists the world over recognize the dangers of using research information from one species and applying it to another.

 

"Animal research doesn't work. It has no scientific value and every good scientist knows that," says Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, M.D., 1986, Head of the Licensing Board for the State of Illinios, paediatrician & gynaecologist for 30 years, medical columnist & best-selling author, recipient of numerous awards for excellence in medicine.

 

Within a year of identifying HIV/AIDS virus, laboratories began experimenting on chimpanzees and infected them with the disease. The test revealed Chimpanzees’ DNA reacts dissimilarly to human DNA as they have different ratios of crucial blood cells. Tests have also been carried out on cats and mice. Currently, the favoured animal model is the monkey, which has also proved an unreliable test subject as their HIV cells do no multiply as they do in humans. Virtually all the advances in understanding and dealing with the HIV infection and AIDS have resulted from analysis which did not include laboratory animals. Yet the experiments continue and animals are suffering needlessly.

 

"Since there is no way to defend the use of animal model systems in plain English or with scientific facts, they resort to double-talk in technical jargon. The virtue of animal model systems to those in hot pursuit of the federal dollars is that they can be used to prove anything - no matter how foolish, or false, or dangerous this might be. There is such a wide variation in the results of animal model systems that there is always some system which will 'prove' a point.The moral is that animal model systems not only kill animals, they also kill humans. There is no good factual evidence to show that the use of animals in cancer research has led to the prevention or cure of a single human cancer," says Dr. D.J. Bross, Ph.D., 1982, former director of the largest cancer research institute in the world, the Sloan-Kettering Institute, then Director of Biostatics, Roswell Memorial Institute, Buffalo, NY.

 

Millions more animal experiments have led to misleading data, resulting in failed vaccines. Many more produced questionable results when laboratory animals were tested with human medication. The link between lung cancer and smoking for example which is now, of course, universally accepted but for years laboratory animals were subjected to tests wherein they were force-fed or injected with tobacco derivatives or forced to inhale cigarette smoke, all of which could not show a link. This gave the tobacco industry ammunition to refute any underlying connection between smoking and lung cancer. For several more years no connection made until a human population study inadvertently discovered a link.

 

In May 2004 the Government announced that a national centre for animal research and welfare was to be established to help replace, refine and reduce the use of animals for scientific purposes.

 

The centre, which will be known as the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research, will report to the Office of Science and Technology. The Centre for Best Practice for Animals in Research will form the core of the new centre.

 

Announcing the centre, Science and Innovation Minister Lord Sainsbury said:

"While I believe that animals still need to be used in research and testing, I also believe strongly that a major opportunity now exists to make progress in replacing, refining and reducing the use of animals and improving their welfare."

Home Office Minister Caroline Flint said the use of animals in scientific procedures is only allowed where absolutely necessary.

"It is vital we maintain the good progress that has already been made on replacing, refining and reducing the use of animals wherever possible. The centre will also lead the important work on promoting the welfare of animals used in scientific procedures."

 

The UK government claims to have one of the most rigorous licensing systems for laboratory animal experimentation in the world, but without exhaustive scrutiny of other countries’ laws, this is a meaningless claim.

 

However, what is clearly the main function of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 (the UK legislation governing animal experiments), is not to safeguard laboratory animals, but to protect the researchers by consenting that lab animals be subjected to the kind of treatment that would be prosecutable outside the laboratory. For this purpose, animal experiments are purposely specified as excluded from the Protection of Animals Act 1911 which is the main legislation protecting animals from cruelty.

 

"Practically all animal experiments are untenable on a statistical scientific basis, for they possess no scientific validity or reliability," says Dr. Herbert Stiller, M.D. & Margot Stiller, M.D., 1976.

 

Under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, it is legal for a laboratory to confine an animal to a cage for the duration of its life or subject it to psychological stress. It is also legal for a laboratory to deprive the animal of food, water, sleep; the laboratory is also permitted to poison the animal, apply skin and eye irritants to it, deliberately infect it with a disease like cancer; as well as cause it brain damage, paralysis, or surgically mutilate it. The Act also permits the laboratory to irradiate the creature, burn it, gas it, force feed it, electrocute it and eventually kill it..

 

Here is a small glimpse into this highly secret industry obtained from an informer:

 

The stench was what shocked me every time I entered the room. In the communal cage there were about 30 baboons and vervet monkeys. They were obviously terrified and clambered on top of one another in a back corner, to get away from me. One baboon did not move but sat in place, rocking back and forth. They had no food or water. Near the empty water bowl there was a dead vervet monkey and next to him was another dying monkey and next to him was a dead baboon. Alongside the communal cage were single laboratory cages. They too did not have food or water. Most of these primates moved around wildly in their cramped confines and were clearly distressed. It was all so wrong, so completely abnormal and wholly depraved to confine these wonderful wild apes to tiny 3ft’ x 3ft’ cages.

 

One of the baboons, I secretly named her Sybil, continually peered down the corridor awaiting her inescapable destiny. She had lost all her hair due to stress. When she wasn’t watching the corridor, she would go around and around in her cage. Dibs, her neighbor, was scared and agitated. He suspended himself from the top of his cage for hours on end; that way he could see the trees outside.

 

I wondered how society would react if they could see what I was looking at. For almost a decade this had been their life. All hope lost.

 

The other handlers thundered in, talking loudly to one another. The apes began screaming in terror. They knew something was going to happen, which often meant torturous pain or death. Wire grids were pounded into their cages as they frantically tried to evade the heartless prodding. They were forced into compartments where they were ruthlessly crushed and mildly sedated, in preparation for what was to follow.

 

An ape would have an operation at 10h00 and then he’d be slung back into his cage. The next morning he’d be poked with a steel rod through the bars of his cage until he woke and then he’d be hosed down with a fire hose. No wonder they never survived. The stress was phenomenal. Putting primates in laboratory cages is the most traumatic thing. They were mainly male baboons and they were huge. And all they could do was stand up and sit down. They couldn’t even stretch.

 

·         Experiments in which baboons and vervet monkeys are used include organ transplants, hepatitis, alcohol and tobacco studies, cancer research, heart disease and pharmacological, immunological and psychological research.

·         Baboons are favored by the research industry for use in experimental xenotransplantation (transplanting cells and organs between species). Some of the experiments involve the transplantation of pig hearts onto the necks of baboons. But recently it has been their link to drug giant Novartis, which apparently involves experiments aimed at placing human genes into days-old piglets and then transplanting their hearts into baboons and monkeys.

·         Apes have been used to test weapons such as ‘dum dum’ bullets, designed to inflict maximum injuries rather than to kill their victims.

·         Baboons were also used in the development of ‘heat resistant military clothing’. This experiment entailed shaving the hair off the baboons’ legs, then covering the skin with the material being tested and finally burning it with a blowtorch. All the baboons died as a result of these wounds.

·         Sodium azide is used in the industrial manufacture of explosives and preservatives. When this chemical was administered to baboons, within three to eight minutes of ingesting the poison they would begin having extreme difficulty breathing, their blood pressure would drop and they would lapse into a coma before dying within 30 to 120 minutes.

·         Tests with Brodifacoum, used commercially in rat poison, caused a monkey to bleed to death from the femoral artery.

·         Organophosphates attack the central nervous systems of baboons within eight hours of being applied to a small patch of naked skin. The baboons were subjected to protracted torture, being injected with an antidote, Atropine, at the first sign of poisoning, only to have the toxin reapplied at 24-hour intervals over a period of up to seven days before succumbing to the inevitable.

·         Many of the baboons that were used were trapped in the Kruger National Park and shipped to the laboratory by the crate load. 

 

In this age of transparency the vivisection industry is by far the least so. They are accountable to no one and are shrouded in secrecy.

 

Vivisection epitomises society’s alienation from other animals. It is a mega global industry sustained and guided by socio-economic factors and powerful institutional pressures, particularly within academia. And because there is so much at stake economically, it is difficult to question it or hold it accountable, let alone dismantle it.

 

"Animal experiments not only fail to contribute to the safety of medications, but they even have the opposite effect," says Prof. Dr. Kurt Fickentscher, 1980, of the Pharmacological Institute of the University of Bonn, Germany.

 

We have no legislation to protect animals in laboratories and the government encourages self-policing ‘ethics’ committees’, meaning there are no effective regulations, supervision or debates around the use of animals in biomedical research or testing facilities.

 

What does this say about the democracy of the British government? Could this be construed as a legal crime or should it be considered as laws lacking for those that are unable to defend themselves?

 

"Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely a fraud, and that the major cancer research organisations are derelict in their duties to the people who support them," says Dr. Linus Pauling, PhD, 1986, two time Nobel Prize Winner.

 

Instead of petitioning the government for additional laws, which would be futile taking into account the already overcrowded prisons and the UK’s ineffectual police service, we should be demanding an overhaul of the entire British legal system – a course of legal steroids, so to speak, progressive ground-breaking change across the board thinking with a moral conscience, not a political conscience, thinking human rights and then animal’s rights.

 

·         In the 2003/4 period the UK recorded 5.9 million crimes, of which only 1.4 million were solved.

·         Re-offending currently costs the British taxpayer around £11-billion per year

·         Under the current legal system, offenders sentenced to less than four years in prison are required to serve at least half of their term, while those sentenced to longer terms must serve at least two-thirds of their time.

·         On 28 November 2003 the prison population in England and Wales stood at 74,182. In the last two years the prison population has increased by nearly 6,000;

·         The UK has the highest imprisonment rate in the European Union at 139 per 100,000, taking over from Portugal, which has an imprisonment rate of 131 per 100,000

·         In 2000 the capacity of the prison estate was 63,346 and the prison population was 65,194 (103 per cent of capacity); in 2001 the capacity was 63,530 and the population was 66,403 (105 per cent); in 2002 the capacity was 64,046 and the population was 71,112 (111 per cent); and in 2003 the capacity was 66,104 and the population was 73,627 (113 per cent)

·         By the end of the decade Home Office projections predict a prison population of anything between 91,400 and 109,600

(statistic 1 to 3) source: Prison Reform Trust briefing 2003 and (statistic 4) source: Home Office

 

A legal system that ensures a punishment fitting to the crime should be put in place. Those who have committed serious crimes (rapists, murderers, child abusers) have by their deeds forfeited their rights in society and should be transferred not to prisons but laboratories to become test subjects for the duration of their sentence. Re-offenders of other crimes could follow a similar route – dependent of the crime.

 

"Vivisection is bad science, producing a lot of misleading and confusing data which pose hazards to human health. It's also a waste of taxpayer's dollars to take healthy animals and artificially and violently induce diseases in them that they normally wouldn't get, or which occur in different form, when we already have the sick people who can be studied while they're being treated,” says Dr. Roy Kupsinel, M.D., 1988, medical magazine editor, USA.

 

Such legal innovation however, would necessitate a true leader who will ensure such a Bill is passed by Parliament; a commander of strong moral fiber that will withstand the  immediate international outcry, which will eventually dissipate when the world watches the UK’s crime statistics drop through the floor.

 

--Ends--

 

Word Count: 2,714

© Cindy-Lou Dale 2005