The Search For Enlightenment

According to Dr Vernon Coleman’s book Why Animal Experiments Must Stop, the total number of animals used it experiments around the world adds up to around 250 million each year.

Whilst it is generally thought that the testing of products or medicines on animals is a worthwhile exercise, much of the evidence, most of it suppressed by the medical research industry, shows that it is a fruitless and often misleading way to evaluate the effects on humans.

Some of the examples of testing cited in the book are truly horrific, made all the more worrying when the person doing the testing are largely funded by you and me, the taxpayers. Hundreds of millions of pounds are secured by the pharmaceutical industry from government to test vaccines and other medicines. Even larger amounts are given as grants to military projects, where the testing is often used to prove the injurious or fatal effects of chemical compounds to be employed as military weapons.

As in so many areas of life, information is ‘spun’ in order to present a sanitised account of what is really going on. Dr Coleman presents a sanitised account of twenty five actual experiments in his book. Sanitised to reduce the sickening details related to the reader. The rationale behind each experiment is not given, but it is difficult to imagine how science might be advanced by them. Here are details of but a few:

• Researchers took fifty nine newly born golden hamster babies, and under ‘hypothermic anaesthesia’, removed the left eye of around half of them. The babies were then returned to their mothers and the results studied.
• American researchers separated kittens from their mothers to see what effect this had. At the end of the experiment, the scientists concluded that the kittens cried more than other kittens who were left with their mothers. They also added that the crying appeared to indicate stress.
• British research scientists surgically joined 224 individual rats to make a set of 112 ‘fake’ Siamese twins.
• A psychologist removed the visual cortex of a monkey, blinding the creature. The animal was then kept for six years to allow behavioural studies to be conducted.

Animal tests can produce dangerously misleading information. Penicillin kills cats and guinea pigs. Aspirin also kills cats. The dangers of thalidomide only came to light after it had been prescribed to pregnant women, despite ‘rigorous animal testing’.

This scandalous cruel torture of animals cannot continue. The incredible waste of money has to stop. Please consider taking the following steps to help put an end to the vivisection industry and save millions of innocent creatures from a life (and death) of misery and pain:

1. Refuse to blindly accept or be intimidated by the claims made by eminent sounding medical professionals. Many of them have remarkably low intelligence and even lower ethics.
2. Join an anti-vivisection organisation in your area.
3. Before donating to charity, ensure that they do not promote any form of testing on animals.
4. Make your views known to your local politician, chances are that she or he is as ignorant of the facts as the general public.
5. Try to buy products that have not been tested on animals.
6. Make your views on vivisection known. Post on Facebook, Twitter and the other social networks. Make as much noise as possible in the name of banning animal testing.
7. Talk to your doctor when you next see them and tell them that you are unhappy to take medicines that have been developed using animal testing. Tell them why you are opposed to the use of animals in the development of medical treatments.
8. If you are a student, and find that your teachers expect you to perform experiments on live or dead animals, refuse to perform the experiments on the grounds that no knowledge can be gained from continually covering old ground. Good educational establishments now allow students to opt out of vivisection during their course, explain this to your tutors if they object.
9. Be aware that it is not only the pharmaceutical industry that tests its products on animals. Many food additives are tested on animals too. Also try to buy products that are free from animal products (fur, wool, leather etc.) as these involve the testing on, or death of in other ways, animals.
10. Focus your efforts. So many anti-vivisection groups spend more time fighting each other than they do fighting the real cause. Don’t waste your efforts, remain mindful and make the most of all your opportunities.

Remember, despite all the claims from individuals in the vivisection industry, for that is what it is, testing on animals is unbelievably barbaric and unforgivably cruel. It is worthless, inaccurate, wasteful, uninformative and dangerously misleading.

The truth is that animal experiments kill people.