It’s too bad that the animal experimenters at Johns Hopkins, Texas A&M, Louisiana State, and other colleges and universities across the country never got word that they’re living in the 21st century. If they had, the monkeys, dogs, birds, rats, and other animals they’ve tormented and killed would still be alive and millions of Americans could be in better health.
At Johns Hopkins, Shreesh Mysore has made a career of torturing barn owls. He cuts into their skulls, sticks electrodes in their brains, forces them to look at screens for hours at a time, bombards them with noises and lights, and pretends he’s helping humans with attention-deficit disorder. When the experiments end, he kills his victims.
Golden retrievers at Texas A&M, bred to have canine muscular dystrophy, a muscle-wasting disease that robs puppies of their ability to run or comfortably walk, were subjected to painful nerve damage and invasive muscle biopsies. The school finally stopped breeding the dogs, but instead of releasing them for adoption as it had promised, it shuffled nine of them off to a different laboratory on campus.
LSU bird torturer Christine Lattin abducts sparrows from their homes, deprives them of food for 15 hours, then places blinking lights, a tinfoil hood, an opened blue cocktail umbrella, and other random objects near their food dish to see how readily they approach it—all this purportedly to test their fear of unfamiliar objects. She then kills the birds and dices up their brains to analyze them for differences in gene expression.
But these medically irrelevant, curiosity-driven experiments on animals aren’t the only ones.
Every year in U.S. laboratories, 110 million animals—each one an individual who experiences fear and pain—are burned, poisoned, or sickened with diseases in cruel chemical, drug, food, and cosmetics tests. Mice are forced to inhale toxic fumes, monkeys are force-fed pesticides, and rabbits endure the application of corrosive chemicals to their skin, to name just a few of the atrocities.
Pharma giant Eli Lilly has subjected nearly 3,500 rats and mice to the discredited “forced swim test” in which the animals are dropped into containers of water and then try desperately but in vain to find a way out. While Eli Lilly claims that it hasn’t conducted the test “for some time,” it nevertheless refuses to implement an official policy banning it. Apparently, the company still thinks it might learn something about depression in humans by terrorizing rodents.
The Department of Defense torments and kills thousands of animals each year during combat-medic training. Instructors dismember live goats with tree trimmers, shoot and stab live pigs, and pull out their organs.
And in middle- and high-school classrooms, students cut open frogs, birds, fish, snakes, and other animals, even though many of them are opposed to dissection and even though peer-reviewed literature confirms that students who use modern, non-animal methods perform better than those who dissect animals.
Ready for the kicker? This obscene amount of suffering isn’t helping Americans have healthier or longer lives.
More than 90% of basic research, most of it involving animals, doesn’t lead to treatments for humans—less than 10% of even the most promising findings translates into human clinical use. And nearly 90% of the experiments can’t be reproduced by other laboratories.
It’s no surprise that 95% of new drugs that test safe and effective in animals fail in human clinical trials or that the failure rates are even sorrier for treatments and vaccines developed for cancer (96.6%), Alzheimer’s disease (99.6%), strokes (100%), and HIV (100%).
You can probably guess who, in many cases, foots the bill. Right—taxpayers.
The National Institutes of Health says it seeks scientific knowledge that will “enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.” Instead, it wastes nearly half of its bloated budget—over $21 billion annually—on deadly, pointless experiments on animals imprisoned in its own laboratories and at universities nationwide. Johns Hopkins’ Mysore has pocketed nearly $2 million of that.
The encouraging news is that the status quo is gradually evolving. Cutting-edge, human cell-based techniques, computer simulations, virtual anatomy software, surgical training models, in vitro methods, organs-on-chips, and three-dimensional human-tissue printing are rewriting the rules. These life-saving innovations are not only humane but also less expensive, more effective, and faster than animal tests.
In the private sector, Johnson & Johnson, Bayer, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Bristol Myers Squibb, and other pharmaceutical companies have dropped the forced swim test.
And PETA, where I work, has proposed a common-sense roadmap for ending experiments on animals. The Research Modernization Deal (RMD) calls for immediately eliminating the use of animals in areas where animal experimentation has failed, critically reviewing other research to determine where animal use can be ended, and redirecting funds to non-animal methods that offer real hope of treatments and cures.
The RMD was recently presented in a Congressional briefing and is gaining momentum. But lives are hanging in the balance right now—the lives of animals in laboratories and of humans who desperately need medical breakthroughs.
It’s time that we made ourselves heard.
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