Health Charities: Helping or Hurting
When you donate to a charity, do you know where the money actually goes? Could your gift be contributing to animal suffering? Some health charities ask for donations to help people with diseases and disabilities yet spend the money to bankroll horrific experiments on dogs, rabbits, rats, mice, primates, hamsters, pigs, ferrets, frogs, fish, guinea pigs, sheep, birds, and other animals. While human health needs cry out for attention and so many people are going without medical care, animal experimentation enriches laboratories and scientists but drains money from relevant and effective projects that could really help save lives.
To study the effects of smoking, experimenters funded by the American Heart Association severed the nerves in dogs' hearts(1) and forced chickens to breathe concentrated cigarette smoke(2)-even though scientists have known for years that smoking causes cancer. They also have cut holes in the throats of newborn lambs, sliced their nerves, and obstructed their breathing,(3) yet the major advances in studying heart disease have come from human data.
Experimenters funded by the March of Dimes sewed the eyes of newborn kittens shut for a year, then killed them, to show that depriving cats of normal vision alters brain development(4)-long an accepted scientific fact. The March of Dimes has given millions of dollars to experimenters who administered nicotine, cocaine, and alcohol to pregnant animals, although we know from human clinical experience that these substances can harm developing babies. Such experiments have no practical benefit to anyone.
Many of the Red Cross' gruesome experiments on rabbits, rats, mice, and toads involve unrelieved pain. One protocol called for rabbits to be bled 22 to 30 percent of their blood volume every two weeks.(5) Shriners Burns Institutes have conducted burn experiments on live mice, rats, guinea pigs, pigs, dogs, and sheep for years. Experimenters there burned nearly one-third of the total skin area on rats to test wound healing in animals treated with clenbuterolÑa drug already in use on human burn victims and with human data readily available.(6) In another experiment, sheeps' throats were burned to test the effect of antibiotics in fighting infection.(7) Many burn victims have already been given antibiotics to fight infection, so there are plentiful data already available. Other organizations, like the International Association of Firefighters Burn Foundation, are funding exciting alternatives to animal use, such as skin cultures, which may ultimately help not only burn victims but individuals in need of other types of tissue transplants.
At Boys Town National Research Hospital, experimenters starved cats for months, implanted tubes and wires in their throats, and cemented metal devices into their skulls, as well as slicing open kittens' heads to cut the nerves in their brains-all in the name of curing deafness. PETA undercover investigators documented serious violations of the federal law at Boys Town, including failure to provide veterinary care for sick animals, use of outdated drugs, and the absence of postsurgical painkillers. The World Federation of the Deaf has condemned these experiments as wasteful and cruel.
Instead of pillaging animals' bodies for cures to human diseases, compassionate charities focus their research where the best hope of treatment lies: with humans. They realize that animal experiments are unnecessary, unreliable, and sometimes dangerously misleading. Enormous variations exist among rats, rabbits, dogs, pigs, and human beings, and meaningful scientific conclusions cannot be drawn about one species by studying another. Non-animal methods provide a more accurate method of testing and can be interpreted more objectively. Compassionate, modern charities know that we can improve treatments through up-to-date, non-animal methods, and they fund only non-animal research, leading to real progress in the prevention and treatment of disease-without starving, crippling, burning, poisoning, or cutting open animals.