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The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM.org) is leading the National Institutes of Health into an ethical, and scientific, realm of science without the barbarity of animal experimentation. This 2018 announcement validates every word of the following essay, which is exactly what informed, free-thinking, compassionate people have been saying for more than 100 years!
Humanitarian and British author George Bernard Shaw summed up vivisection best when he once proclaimed, "Those who won't hesitate to vivisect, won't hesitate to lie about it as well."
Vivisection is the act of cutting, drugging, burning, blinding, shocking, addicting, shooting, freezing, infecting and surgically mutilating live animals. Vivisection also happens to be more than just bloody science. It's a bloody fraud. [See the video below, at right.] Every year in the U.S., around 20 million monkeys, dogs, cats, pigs and rabbits, and some 50 to 80 million rats, mice, and other rodents, are incarcerated and infected with mutations of human diseases, tortured in violent burn and brain-damage re-creation experiments, observed for meaningless data, and killed.
First, let's understand that animals are a completely different bio-mechanical entity than humans. The anatomical, physiological, immunological, histological [dealing with the cell structures] and even psychological differences between humans and animals are too great to overcome. At this moment, a formula for making animal-derived research relevant to human health is non-existent. Animal research has not, cannot and will not save human lives because information cannot be extrapolated from one species to another.
Let me elucidate this point for you in a few ways. Every day in veterinary schools all across this world, the fraud of vivisection is substantiated. After talking with several veterinarians who unfortunately have been fooled into believing that animal research can be beneficial to humans, I asked them, "When you were in vet school studying feline leukemia, which animal did you study upon?" They all replied, "Cats." I asked them why they didn't use dogs for feline leukemia research. They replied that studying dogs for feline leukemia didn't make too much sense scientifically. I then asked why dogs, cats and other animals are used for human leukemia research. Their silence exposed the scam. Veterinarians invalidate the widespread use of species-to-species extrapolation because they use cats for feline leukemia research, horses for colic research, dogs for canine distemper research and so on. They don't use dogs for cats, pigs for dogs, and monkeys for horses. For the record, I ethically oppose what takes place in veterinary schools. Understand, though, I cannot oppose it on scientific grounds because it is scientifically justifiable to research on the species in question when searching for treatments and cures for that species. However, when it comes to using animals as predictor models for humans, my opposition is ethical AND scientific.
No matter how diligently animal researchers try, they can never re-create the spontaneously-occurring diseases that humans get. They can only re-create symptoms and give mutations. Plus, the experiments are always done in a controlled, manipulative environment where researchers can produce whatever answer they're looking for. If researchers want to show that there is NO link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer, no problem: just bring in some dogs, hook them up to facial mechanical devices, and force them to inhale smoke with every breath. It's true that smoking tobacco does NOT cause lung cancer in dogs. Then again, I haven't met too many dogs who smoke Kools in the first place. How about showing that diet drugs are safe for humans? No problem. Bring in some rodents, gorge them until they become obese and give them large doses of fenphen. For the record, the diet drug fenphen passed all rat research protocols but was taken off the market years ago after killing several humans. Over the years, thousands of drugs have 'passed' animal research tests only to harm or kill humans later on.
Were you aware that every two to three seconds someone in the world dies from a disease the medical community has known how to cure for nearly two thousand years? That disease is malnutrition. But in early 1998, with a hefty grant, The Detroit Free Press reported that animal researchers were close to identifying the hunger gene in rats. Huh? How many more meaningless, idiotic and wasteful experiments will researchers conduct and, more importantly, will society condone? The sad truth is that medicine—in its myriad of treatments—is a commodity. If you can't afford it, then you don't get it. Keep this in mind as well: not one of Jerry's Kids has ever walked or been cured of muscular dystrophy even though the telethons have taken in more than $50 billion dollars. And that's a generous estimate. It's probably much more. The money has come from kind people who have been duped by the animal research community's guileful, mendacious and insidious hook: "this latest mouse experiment is hopeful and promising." Hopeful and promising—the two favorite words of a vivisectionist—can be translated into "send more money so I can continue my lifelong mission of gathering useless information."
Dr. Christopher Anderegg, who received his medical degrees from the Yale University School of Medicine, explained, "It is impossible to predict human reactions to drugs, vaccines and other chemicals by testing them on animals." Still, vivisectionists lie about the value of animal experimentation and remain unwilling to use the following 10 forms of true scientific research techniques; 1) human-based clinical research; 2) epidemiology (study, causes and distribution of human diseases); 3) cellular and molecular biology using human-based tissue and cell cultures and in vitro; 4) autopsy research; 5) biopsy research; 6) computer models using virtual reality, simulators and 3D programs; 7) mathematical models using formulas to determine drug concoctions and reactions; 8) case studies; 9) human-based DNA/genetic research; 10) trial-and-error methodology.
Fortunately, some people and organizations are responding to the truth. Dozens of charities like The Easter Seals Foundation, The American Kidney Fund and The International Eye Foundation, to name a few, only use the aforementioned methods of scientific research and, more importantly, refuse to perform or fund any form of animal research. So, if Easter Seals engages in essential non-animal-based research for birth defects, while The March of Dimes engages in vivisection because it claims that's the only way to conduct birth defect research, I ask you, "Who's lying?" I hope you feel the same way I do when asked to select between two diametrically opposed positions. Personally, I always side with the victims of injustice. Since healing human beings cannot be based upon violent protocols and human medicine cannot be based upon a false, duplicitous model, it seems clear to me who's lying. Polio victim Linn Pulis once eloquently said, "I would not want to promote research on animals. Fortunately, only my back is twisted, not my mind."
Dr. Richard Klausner, animal researcher and former director (1995-2001) of the National Cancer Institute, a huge animal researching entity, once said, "The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades and it simply doesn't work in humans." In the February 11, 2013 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the headline of a 10-year National Institute of Health (NIH) study read, "Genomic responses in mouse models poorly mimic human inflammatory diseases." NIH director Francis Collins stated, "If it works in mice, so we thought, it should work in humans. But 150 drugs that successfully treated sepsis in mice later failed in human clinical trials." Sepsis affects 750,000 people in the U.S. every year, killing one-fourth to half of them!
For some amazing information on why vivisection is unscientific, please check out Americans, Europeans, and Japanese for Medical Advancement. It is the website of Dr. Ray Greek, the world's foremost expert in determining the value of all medical research. And watch the documentary Hidden Crimes also. Recorded in the 1990s, it is still one of the most insightful documentaries about the unethical and unscientific nature of vivisection. [There are eight segments on YouTube; the first of these is presented at left above.] Also, as if to show how archaic animal models and experiments truly are, even the University of Pittsburgh, the American university which tortures the largest number of animals annually, has ceased using animals in one of its courses.
Dr. Jerry Vlasak: Physician, Activist, Anti-Vivisectionist
NOTE: The following piece was written by Dr. Jerry Vlasak, a trauma surgeon in several California hospitals, and one of the world's grittiest abolitionists. Dr. Vlasak has been arrested, and physically assaulted, simply for coming to the aid of Canadian seal pups during the annual Canadian seal massacres. (You can e-mail Dr. Vlasak by clicking here). Read what Dr. Vlasak has to say about the inefficacy and moral bankruptcy of vivisection:
On a daily basis, animals are drowned, suffocated and starved to death; they have their limbs severed and their organs crushed; they are burned, exposed to radiation and used in experimental surgeries; they are shocked, raised in isolation, exposed to weapons of mass destruction and rendered blind or paralyzed; they are given heart attacks, ulcers, paralysis, and seizures; they are forced to inhale tobacco smoke, drink alcohol, and ingest various drugs like heroin and cocaine.
Those who perpetrate these still legal crimes, their utter and complete violence, callousness and indifference against non human animals, can't and don't want to see that what they are doing is not only a crime against God, Allah, Buddha, nature and life itself, but results in the suffering and death of millions of humans. The University and pharmaceutical industry's addiction to archaic and outmoded animal research results in millions of humans getting sicker, fatter and dying of completely preventable diseases.
With all the millions of dollars wasted—and I repeat, wasted—on the scientific fraud of vivisection, the only result is that over the past half century Cancer deaths are UP, Strokes are UP, Heart Disease UP, Diabetes UP, and Obesity way UP.
I became a surgeon, a doctor, in order to save lives. I spent many years in preparation for my being able to work as a doctor; four years of university, four years of medical school, a year of internship and then five additional years of surgical residency. I, like the rest of my fellow students, was naïve and impressionable. We had been brought up and brainwashed by the meat and dairy industries to think that flesh and cow's milk made you strong and was good for you; and we had been brought up and brainwashed to believe that animal experimentation was a necessary evil and had to be done in order to save the lives of our patients. Like the billion dollar meat and dairy industry spin machine, the university system and pharmaceutical industry has done a very good job at taking young impressionable students and addicting them to outmoded and unscientific animal research.
I'd like to tell you two short stories. The first is about a five-year-old girl who came into the emergency room with appendicitis. The little girl was so obese that her breasts were as large as a girl in her teens, and she weighed twice as much as a normal child her age. She needed an emergency appendectomy and the surgery I performed was made much more difficult by her obesity. When patients are obese, their fat layers complicate not only the actual surgery being performed, but the complication rate after surgery drastically increases. The little girl already had type II diabetes, which is now common in American children. Type II diabetes is completely preventable and has historically been seen in adults who are obese themselves. But because of the meat, dairy and sugar industries, we have a new generation of children who are sick, fat and miserable. The little girl made it through surgery and when she was recovering I sat down with her and her parents and spoke to them about a low fat vegetarian diet and drinking soy milk instead of cow's milk, which as you know is linked to all kinds of illnesses.
I told her that a low fat vegetarian diet is proven to prevent the most common diseases that millions of people die from every single year; diseases such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes and hardening of the arteries. The mother began to cry and said that her little girl was teased by the other kids and couldn't even play like a normal child because of her weight; that she was always coming down with ailments and that she was lethargic and fell asleep in school. Then the mother looked at me with tears in her eyes and asked "Why hasn't any other doctor given us this information?" This scenario is common in my practice, and is the direct result of the absolute power, greed and corruption of the meat and dairy industries.
The next story is about my introduction into the world of vivisection, while I was a surgical resident. I was told that I could make a name for myself if I published papers and experimented on animals; and I was told that universities were given LOTS of money by the government as long as they continued to do experiments on animals. Being the naïve young doctor and wanting to follow the lead of others, I did a year of vivisection and visited animal labs throughout the country. What I learned and what I saw with my own eyes was mind-boggling. I learned that 85% of all the data gathered from animal experiments was literally thrown away because it was of no use to anyone, human or nonhuman; never even published, much less used to help people. Almost all of the remainder of this data was never found useful for human healthcare.
And that 1 or 2% of data that was possibly, one day, maybe going to be useful in helping people? That data could have been obtained more accurately and cheaply using modern, progressive non-animal methods. Then I learned that the pharmaceutical companies spent millions of dollars taking doctors out to dinner and paying for lavish vacations for them and their families, and in turn these researchers were to manipulate animal experiments to get the results that the drug industries wanted. Then I learned that the way universities get grant money isn't by coming up with the best and most scientific research methods, but by continuing to use animals as a model because of the billions of dollars made in the vivisection industry. I learned that the vivisection industry is like the Mafia; the scientists and drug companies who engage in animal research will do whatever it takes to continue the practice even though it not only harms humans, but causes enormous agony and suffering to the animals being experimented on.
Greed, corruption and absolute power; these are the things that drive the vivisection industry, NOT saving lives or preventing disease. In a world that has discovered gene expression and can look at diseases on the cellular and molecular level, animal experimentation has no place—and I repeat, NO PLACE—in 21st-century science. We now know that based on molecular biology and gene expression, a drug that reacts a certain way in a male rat, may react completely differently in a female rat. But what about primates that share 99% of our DNA? It's not the 99% that's important, but the 1% that makes the difference in a non-human primate reacting totally differently to a medicine or surgical procedure than a human primate.
We are not going to save the lives of our fellow humans by using archaic, outmoded animal experimentation. The scientists who still use animals in their research are not only frauds, but are addicted to an outdated form of research. Colin Blakemore for instance, who has sewn kittens' eyes closed for fun and profit, is no more of a true scientist than the mad scientists in the monster movies we watched in the '50s. Blakemore is not a doctor. Like most animal experimenters, he is simply a wanna-be medical doctor who didn't have the social skills nor the brains to make it through medical school. And those medical doctors who are performing experiments on animals are simply the instruments of a corrupt university system and the pharmaceutical industry.
Xenotransplantation
Xenotransplantation is an experimental procedure in which animal organs or tissues are transferred into human bodies. This is obscenely unethical because animals weren't created to be our spare parts, just like they weren't put here to be sandwiches. Trying to justify one unethical, immoral practice (meat-eating) with another (xenotransplantation) is vicious and invalid. It's like saying, "Since children are molested, we might as well make child pornography films." One evil act should not perpetuate another. It's shameful and vile that humans have turned animals into commodities. We never seem to learn from past mistakes. Whites used to view blacks in the same regard. Men used to—and still do in many cases—view women as commodities. Discrimination is always wrong, which means that speciesism is just as irrational and nefarious as racism and sexism. If America instituted Europe's PRESUMED CONSENT, there would be no shortage of organs, and people wouldn't be looking to exploit animals further. Presumed consent means that everyone who dies is presumed to be a donor UNLESS stated otherwise. So people have a right to opt out of organ donation, but one has to take the initiative to opt out. Xenotransplantation is also bad medicine. It has never been successful. Although both beat and pump blood, baboon hearts and pig hearts are physiologically dissimilar to human hearts. And no amount of medical tinkering can compensate for that inherent difference.
Anti-Vivisection Resources on the Web
- Americans, Europeans, And Japanese For Medical Advancement: founded by Dr. Ray Greek, a physician and pre-eminent scientist who adamantly opposes medical research on animals
- Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM): a group of doctors who advocate preventative medicine and true scientific research
- Cruelty Free Kitty: a list of companies that neither use animal-based ingredients nor test their products on animals
The images on this webpage are courtesy of Occupy for Animals. Please visit their website and click “Research” at the top for much more information about the cruelty and inefficacy of vivisection, as well as many more disturbing images and videos.