PLAN 2000 – BRINGING AN END TO ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION

by Dr Vernon Coleman

Many people don't understand exactly what sort of experiments animals are used for. Those who want animal experiments to continue usually argue that the experiments are painless and that the animals do not suffer. The truth is very different.

 

I have filing cabinets filled with research papers from universities and institutions around the world and there seems to be no end to the variety of indignities that researchers can think up for the unfortunate animals in their power. On the pages which follow, I have listed very brief summaries of just a handful of typical animal experiments - often allegedly conducted to test new drugs, theories and procedures. These examples are taken from my book Why Animal Experiments Have To Stop. Just remember that these experiments are neither more or less horrifying than thousands of similar experiments performed every day in laboratories around the world. And remember that most of these experiments were performed on your behalf and with your money. Read these brief details and decide for yourself whether or not animal experiments should stop.

 

1.      British researchers blinded two domestic tabby kittens by sewing up their conjunctivae and eyelids. The kittens were then placed in a special holder and horseradish peroxidase was injected into their brains. The kittens were then killed.

 

2. Three researchers conducted an experiment in which female hamsters were distracted with sunflower seeds so that their babies could be removed from the nest a few hours after birth. Under 'hypothermic anaesthesia' the baby hamsters had their left eyes removed. They were then returned to their mothers. The scientists used fifty nine golden hamsters in this experiment and removed the eyes from 'about half'.

 

3. At the United States Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, a researcher spent nine weeks forcing thirty-nine monkeys to run on a cylindrical treadmill known as an 'activity wheel'. If the monkeys failed to run long enough they got an electric shock.

 

4. Researchers funded by the UK Medical Research Council gave ferrets a drug that made them vomit at between half minute and five minute intervals. The researchers gave the ferrets another drug and concluded that under some circumstances the ferrets did not stand up to vomit and that under the influence of the second drug their vomiting was less forceful.

 

5. Three adult female cats were selected for a laboratory experiment because they were very docile. Wires from the cats' eyes were connected to a device held in place on the cats' skulls with self-tapping stainless steel screws. The cats were kept awake and their eye movements measured while their bodies were rotated and tilted and stimulated in other ways.

 

6. American researchers separated young kittens from their mothers to see what effect this had. At the end of the experiment the scientists concluded that separated kittens cried more than those who remained in close contact with their mothers. The scientists added that crying seemed to denote stress.

 

7. Two researchers working in America conducted a series of experiments designed to make baby monkeys depressed. To begin with they created a cloth, surrogate mother which could be triggered to blow out high pressure compressed air. When the baby monkey went to give its fake mum a hug the researcher would press a button and try to blast the baby monkey away. However, this did not work and the baby monkey merely clung on tighter. The researchers then built a surrogate monster mother that was designed to rock so violently that the baby's head and teeth would rattle. Again the baby monkey just clung on tightly. The third monster had a wire frame built into its body. The frame was designed to throw the baby away from it. This worked to a certain extent - in that it did successfully separate the baby from its fake mother - but the baby monkey just picked itself up and went back to its fake mother immediately afterwards. In a final attempt to alienate, terrify and thus depress the baby monkey the researchers built a 'porcupine' mother from which, at the press of a remote switch, sharp brass spikes would leap out. Once again the experiment was a failure for although the baby monkey was upset by the spikes it simply waited until the spikes had been withdrawn before returning to its fake 'mother'.

 

8. The same researchers also created a 'well of despair' for monkeys. They built a vertical chamber with stainless steel sides and a rounded bottom and put two young monkeys in it for weeks at a time. On this occasion the researchers were successful. The monkeys eventually sat huddled at the bottom of the chamber looking depressed.

 

9. Scientists pushed fine polythene tubes into rats' brains. They then put balloons into the rats' brains and blew them up. They found that all the rats suffered brain damage but that the smaller balloons did not produce as much damage as the big balloons.

 

10. Four research scientists surgically joined together 224 individual rats to make 112 sets of 'fake' Siamese twins.

 

11. Rats' tails were immersed in hot water so that the experimenters could study pain in rats.

 

12. Ten beagle dogs were deliberately given stomach ulcers.

 

13. Balloons made from condoms were pushed into dogs' stomachs through metal tubes and then filled with water. During the experiment the dogs, which were hung in slings, were kept awake.

 

14. The livers, kidneys and lungs of Guernsey calves were deliberately damaged to see how this affected the way in which the animals responded to drugs. The researchers concluded that animals with damaged organs sometimes get more unpleasant side effects when they take drugs.

 

15. Six monkeys were given a drug so that they would develop Parkinson's disease. They were then given the drug which is commonly used to treat Parkinson's disease in human. When the monkeys symptoms improved they were killed.

 

16. Cuts were made in the bodies of pregnant rats and metal screws cooled in liquid nitrogen were held against the developing heads of the baby rats. The baby rats were later killed and their brains removed so that the amount of damage could be assessed.

 

17. Two researchers found that if they breathed heavily on ants as they came out of their nest early in the morning the ants panicked.

 

18. Three research workers shot around twenty monkeys just above the eye and then watched to see how long it took them to die. One monkey survived for over two and a half hours.

 

19. A psychologist removed a monkey's visual cortex and then kept the blinded monkey for six years so that he could study her behaviour.

 

20. Researchers have kept the brains of animals alive outside their bodies and have transplanted the heads of monkeys onto the bodies of other animals. Such experiments have taken place in a number of laboratories.

 

21. An American researcher gave a pair of rats a total of 15 000 electric shocks in seven and a half hours. Later the researcher heated the cage floor so that the rats inside jumper about, licking their feet, as the floor got hotter and hotter.

 

22. Researchers clipped the hair from forty beagle puppies. They then put kerosene soaked gauze onto the beagles' naked bodies and set fire to the gauze.

 

23. In a series of experiments conducted in France over thirty baboons were killed in forty miles an hour fake car crashes. A number of monkeys were killed when their skulls were hit with a hammering device. The experiment showed that animals would be endangered if they drove cars into walls at forty miles an hour.

 

24. In a Canadian experiment three polar bears were made to swim through a tank filled with crude oil and water. When the oil coated their fur the bears tried to lick themselves clean. They swallowed so much oil that they developed kidney failure and died. The conclusion was that polar bears should be kept away from oil slicks.

 

25. Two experimental scientists designed a drum rather like a tumbledrier for traumatising alert, awake animals. The drum was made so that it turned over forty times a minute with the animals inside falling from one side to the other twice during each rotation. During a five-minute experiment, an animal inside the drum fell four hundred times. The animal's paws were taped together so that it could not break its fall and interfere with the traumatising process. Animals traumatised in the drum suffered broken teeth, concussion, bleeding and bruising of the liver.

 

Animal experiments are worthless as well as barbaric. Vivisection is unbelievably barbaric and unforgivably cruel. It is also worthless, wasteful, inaccurate, uninformative and dangerously misleading. And it is done with your money by scientists who claim that they are performing their evil rituals on your behalf.

 

The cruelty is indefensible and an affront to human dignity, but in a desperate attempt to justify their evil practices, many vivisectors still claim that what they do helps save human lives. They are lying. The truth is that animal experiments kill people and animal researchers are responsible for the deaths of thousands of men, women and children every year; they are also directly responsible for a massive amount of human suffering.

 

The callous self-interest of vivisectors leads directly to the development and marketing of unsafe drugs and medical practices; there is, without a shadow of a doubt, a conspiracy between the medical profession and the drugs industry to defend and protect a practice which has as much relevance to science as alchemy.

 

A future, more enlightened world will see vivisection as one of the more obscene and inexplicable practices of our age; it is our equivalent of slavery and cruel colonialism and those who fail to condemn it loudly will be branded as being as guilty as the vivisectors themselves by tomorrow's generations.

Dr Vernon Coleman, Plan 2000 Information Office, 234 Summergangs Road, Hull, HU8 8LL (Part 2 – Next Eclub)

 

CHARITIES FUNDING ANIMAL EXPERIMENTERS.

The following charities fund some animal experiments. They maintain that there are sometimes no alternatives to the use of animals.

 

Action Research for the Crippled Child

Arthritis & Rheumatism Council

Asthma Society

Association for International Cancer Research

British Diabetic Association

British Epilepsy Association

British Heart Foundation

British Lung Foundation

British Committee for the Prevention of Blindness

Cancer Research Campaign

Charles Hodgson Foundation for Children

Cystic Fibrosis Research Trust

Foundation for Age Research

Imperial Cancer Research Fund

Leverhulme Trust

Lister Institute Of Preventative Medicine

Mental Health Foundation

Multiple Sclerosis Society

Muscular Dystrophy Society

National Diabetes Foundation

National Fund for Research into Crippling Diseases

National Kidney Research Fund

Nuffield Foundation

Parkinson's Disease Society

Peel Medical Research Trust

Royal National Institute of the Blind

Sir Jules Thorn Charitable Trust

Tenovus Cancer Research Appeal

Wessex Medical School Trust

 

MEMBERS OF BIBRA - ANIMAL TESTING LABORATORIES

In this section are listed UK Companies who are members of BIBRA. BIBRA (British Industrial Biological Research Association) Toxicology International is an animal research laboratory which carries out contract testing for companies who may not have their own testing license. BIBRA is based in Surrey employing over 150 researchers at its laboratories. It derives its income from member subscriptions and contract testing. Much of this contract work is undertaken for member companies. Some member companies may only subscribe to the information and publication services of BIBRA:

 

Azco Chemicals

Philip Morris

Boots PLC

Nutrasweet

Borden UK

Nestle Co

Bristol Myers

Clairol

Proctor & Gamble

British Petroleum

Rayner & Co

Ciba Geigy

Roche Products

Fisons PLC

Smith & Nephew

General Foods

Smithkline Beecham

Hoechst UK

Sterling Winthrop Group

Imperial Tobacco

Unilever

Int. Distillers

Warner Lambert UK

Johnson Wax

Wellcome Foundation

London International

Westbrook Lanolin

Monsanto PLC

 

U.S. Companies that manufacture products which are tested on animals:

 

Alberto Culver

S. C. Johnson

Calvin Klein

Kimberley Clark

Carter Wallace

Lever Brothers

Church & Dwight

Max Factor

Clairol

Maybelline

Colgate Palmolive

Pfizer

Coty

Proctor & Gamble

Cover Girl

Reckitt & Coleman

Elizabeth Arden

Sally Hanson

Al Sanofi

Schering Plough

Erno Laszio

Scott Paper

Faberge

Shiseido Co

Fendi

Smithkline Beecham

Flame Grow

Unilever

Gillette Co

Vidal Sassoon

Helene Curtis

Warner Lambert

Johnson & Johnson

 

PHILLIP DAY’S COMMENT: The animal experimentation issue is known by most. However the majority are not aware of the acutely barbaric nature of much of the experimentation that goes on. Over the past few months, Credence has had cause to bring distressing stories of animal abuses and errant and cruel slaughterhouse practices and ‘culling’ (murdering) to the public’s attention.

 

Being knowledgeable on the subject however is not enough. Pressure must be brought to bear on those who continue to use defenceless animals for their own ends. The cats, dogs, cows, sheep and goats being destroyed are no different from your own beloved pets. Yet who is going to speak out for these precious animals who do not have their own caring owner? These animals know fear, horror and pain. It is especially repugnant to me that the alleged aim of these tests is ‘to improve mankind’s health and opportunity to overcome disease.’ I’ve got a novel concept for you: How about feeding and watering mankind properly to boost their natural immunity and advising them on what to do for themselves? Would anyone care to nominate nutrition for a Nobel Prize in this regard? Are you prepared to add your voice to see these tragic experiments outlawed and those responsible being brought to account?