End Animal Testing
End unnecessary animal testing by replacing them with humane, more advanced experiments
Over 115 million animals worldwide are used every year for medical, physiatric, cosmetic or military industry experiments and are killed after having experienced atrocious suffering and mutilations.
Many animal species are used including rabbits, dogs, cats, pigs, cattle, monkeys, mice, fish, birds etc.—such a long list of animals whose lives are sacrificed for cruel, useless and misleading experiments.
Harmful gases, drugs, alcohol, and carcinogens are inhaled or injected into these animals’ bodies. The animals are sometimes blinded or holes are made in their heads. Incredibly, animals are used to test lipstick or nail polish or the effects of smoke or alcohol —even though animals do not themselves use these products, and even though there are billions of people available for testing.
Animal experimentation is almost always not predictive: we cannot directly compare the immune system, brain or liver of an animal to that of a human.
Each animal species, including humans, has its own unique and unrepeatable genome that is different from any other species.
Many substances that had been proven effective for use on animals turned out to be toxic and deadly for humans. Examples of this are endless, testifying to the absolute uselessness of continuing to torture and kill animals for testing purposes. Here are just a few examples:
- Thalidomide, a substance tested on rabbits with the goal of verifying efficacy in treating tumors, did not produce toxic effects on animals. However, when taken by pregnant women, the result was malformations in the limbs of over 10,000 newborns.
- Chimpanzees are immune from AIDS, so any test would be useless and misleading. At least 85 vaccines have proven effective for the treatment of AIDS in primates, but all—without exception—failed when tested on humans.
- Drugs that have proven effective in treating cancer in mice have all failed when tested on humans.
- Benzene, a chemical highly toxic to humans and a confirmed cause of leukemia, had proven harmless to mice.
- Millions of humans continued for years to be exposed to asbestos and die from mesothelioma because experiments had not established any onset of cancer in laboratory-tested animals.
- The anti-inflammatory Vioxx is believed to have been responsible for causing more than 100,000 deaths due to myocardial infarction, but its marketing authorization had been supported by animal tests, in which it had not caused any disease.
The list of failures determined by animal tests is long. Fully 90% of animal-tested medicines are rejected prior to human clinical trials because the substances are determined to be dangerous or ineffective. Furthermore, among humans there are not the genome differences that are found between two different lines of laboratory mice. This is not to mention the vast differences between the genomes of animals and humans.
A sizeable amount of taxpayer money ends up in the hands of research centers using animals for testing.
OnlyAnimals believes that:
- we do not have the right to abuse, torture, or kill animals for experiments and
- animal testing can be replaced by significantly more effective alternatives that were not available years ago.
Experiments on human cells, developed through cell cultures in the laboratory, allow today for testing the toxicity and effectiveness of new drugs under development with significantly more reliable results than those from animal tests.
Furthermore, researchers today have developed with the support of artificial intelligence a wide range of statistical predictive models of the efficacy and toxicity of new drugs. For example, QSAR (Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship) regressive models are predictive computerized techniques more sophisticated and safer than animal test models because they are able to fully analyze the chemical and biological effects of the substances tested to treat a certain disease.
The problem is that researchers are not able to use the more sophisticated and effective techniques due to a lack of knowledge, expertise, skills and due to fear that their funding may be reduced, as the new techniques are often quite less expensive.
What OnlyAnimals is doing:
Through its campaigns, OnlyAnimals:
- Promotes greater public awareness of the cruelty and uselessness of animal experiments for the development of new drugs. Strives to convince the public, drug approval regulatory agencies and legislators around the world to be forward-thinking and stop animal experiments!
- Fights until research centers replace animal testing, which is based on an obsolete scientific paradigm, with new, more effective, more predictive methodologies based on the testing of human cells and supported by sophisticated computerized techniques and the employment of artificial intelligence.
Help us! Your donation is critical for us!
References:
